


Dreams of Another Kind

by LeDiz



Series: The 48: Ratchet & Clank [2]
Category: Ratchet & Clank
Genre: Family, Gen, Kinda, Time Travel, very unfinished
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-08-18 06:11:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8151850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeDiz/pseuds/LeDiz
Summary: After Kaden zaps himself (he wasn't messing with things, he was evaluating their safety!), he starts having nightmares of a young boy that knows the battlefield all too well.





	1. Chapter 1

_Kaden yelped and immediately dropped the device before shoving his fingers in his mouth and glaring at it._

_“What did I_ just _tell you?” Toen asked, frowning at him over the holo-monitor._

_“I didn’t touch it,” he lied around his fingers._

_To his credit, Toen didn’t roll his eyes. He did ask, “So what did it_ not _just do to you?”_

_“Zap me. Like static electricity.”_

_“Get it checked out before you leave. I’m pretty sure this stuff is zoni or technaroid in origin, so it shouldn’t be dangerous, but you can never be too careful,” he said, and then flicked a hand. “Now go bother someone else. I have to finish cataloguing and you’re always a distraction.”_

_He drew himself up, removing his hand from his mouth to emphasise how important he could look. “I am a Guardian of the Avoidables, Toen, it’s my duty to make sure none of this is dangerous.”_

_“No, it’s your duty to guard things that have been proven dangerous,” he said. “None of which this has. Now get out of my lab.”_

_He scowled but did so, shaking his still-stinging fingers in the hope of removing the feeling._

 

* * *

 

He was standing by a dark window, staring out into the depths of space. He blinked at the darkness a few times, not entirely sure how he’d gotten there,  before a reflection on the glass made him realise he wasn’t alone.

There was a boy in the room behind him, disassembling a line of weapons that could easily match him in size. He was a skinny kid, with a waist Kaden was pretty sure he could wrap a hand around, but his coat was shiny and well-cared for. There was something strangely familiar about him too. Nothing he could specifically pinpoint, but there was something about his eyes and fur that just seemed… _familiar_.

What was more disturbing was the methodical familiarity with which the boy handled the weapons. He effortlessly unloaded and stripped each one like a trained guardsman. His gaze was focussed but not intense. It was clearly a chore he was familiar with, and understood the value in. The number of weapons, too, was a little strange. Nine guns. Three grenade launchers. Devices Kaden couldn’t recognise beyond knowing they were dangerous.

He couldn’t have been more than twenty cycles. He should have still been in school. Should have been chasing girls and trying to get his hovercar license. And here he was in front of Kaden’s eyes, cleaning killing machines with the easy grace of a trained mercenary.

Kaden woke up with a start, eyes snapping open only to stare blindly at his girlfriend’s back.

He wasn’t sure why the dream had freaked him out, but it did.

 

* * *

 

His eyes were shut tight when he slowly became aware of voices around him. Two voices – one male, one female, flirting shamelessly. He wondered if he’d left the television on and slowly opened his eyes.

Only to realise he didn’t recognise the plush living room he found himself lying in. He slowly sat up, searching for the voices and wondering how he’d gotten there.

A young cazar woman was leaning over a nearby table, her tail swinging lazily back and forth as she smirked at the boy from Kaden’s earlier dream. He seemed a little younger than before. Too young to be smirking so confidently under a woman’s attention.

“Everyone purrs,” the woman said, leaning a little closer. “Every felid in the universe.”

“Well, then, lombaxes must not be felid. Because we don’t purr,” the boy replied confidently.

“Ohh, I bet you do,” she said, her own voice lowering into a more figurative purr than the one they were talking about. “I bet I can make it happen.”

He grinned and slowly started moving around the table, fingers dragging lightly along the wood. “I’ll take that bet. And double it on the bet I can get better sounds out of you.”

Kaden raised his eyebrows. _He_ hadn’t been that cocky until he was at least twenty-five, let alone however old this kid was! And what was the kid doing, talking like that to a cazar? What was she doing, flirting back? He’d heard of interspecies dating before, but it wasn’t exactly something he understood. He wasn’t even sure this was legal. She looked fully grown. The kid was clearly not. Kaden had multiple issues with what was playing out in front of him.

And yet, here he was, dreaming about a cazar girl reaching out to grab a young boy’s harness and drag him the last few steps into her personal space. They stopped there, just grinning at each other in silent challenge until she leaned down to murmur against his ear, “You’re on.”

He spasmed awake, all five limbs flailing before he realised he was back on his own couch in his own home, alone, with the television playing a harmless gameshow. He huffed out a breath and tried to forget the whole thing.

 

* * *

 

The sky was egg shell blue overhead. He stared at it quietly for a long time, only vaguely aware of the soft rustling of paper behind him.

Eventually, he tilted his head back to look for the source of the noise, and was only mildly surprised to see the boy again. He was properly dressed for once, with an orange space-shirt and combat boots, though he still wore those ridiculous gloves that dwarfed his arms. Today he was sitting under a tree, notebook on one knee and textbook on the other. He seemed older now, past school age, but still studying. A scientist, maybe?

“Ah, here you are,” a voice noted, and Kaden pushed himself up onto an elbow to look for the source. A small robot was walking across the field toward them. Not a model Kaden recognised, but that wasn’t saying much. He’d never been too deep into machines that talked back. It seemed to look at him curiously as it came closer, but soon turned its attention back to the boy. “How is it coming along?”

“Slowly,” the boy replied. “I don’t think this translates into Common.”

“That seems strange. It is unusual to use any other language. May I see?”

“Knock yourself out. I’m not getting anywhere,” he said, and the little robot stepped up to peer at the textbook. It tilted its head.

“I think you may be correct. That, or it is written in code. I wonder if the lombaxes kept up their ancestral language?”

“Wouldn’t that just be typical if they did,” the boy drawled, and then sighed before snapping the book shut. He collapsed back against the tree behind him, staring up at the sky. “Why am I doing this, Clank? Why do I keep doing this to myself?”

“I do not know,” it confessed. “But I think I understand, all the same.”

The boy smiled, just a little, but said nothing.

Kaden woke up slowly this time, feeling very, very alone.

 

* * *

 

_Alister lowered his pen to focus properly on Kaden. “Weird dreams? What, you mean like waking up late on your first day of school even though you haven’t been to school in years?”_

_“No,” he said. “That would make some kind of sense. These are… I don’t know what these are.”_

_“Dreams are supposed to be your subconscious telling you something, right?” he pointed out. “That or too many biscuits before bed. What are they about?”_

_“A kid,” he explained slowly. “A really young kid, just… doing stuff. Like snippets of his life.”_

_“A kid? You’re a little young for the biological clock to be ticking, aren’t ya?” he teased, and Kaden glared at him, sitting back in his chair with his arms folded._

_“Shut up. He’s not like a baby, he’s… I don’t know, high school aged?” he guessed._

_“Well, what’s he look like? Maybe he’s an actor you’ve seen on the holo-vids and you’re projecting, or something.”_

_He rolled his eyes but thought back, trying to envision the kid in his mind’s eye. “Gold fur, brown stripes. Green eyes. Forward muzzle.”_

_“Definitely sounds like an actor,” Alister muttered. “Have you ever seen an actor_ without _a forward muzzle? And blond with green eyes? Tch. Teen heartthrob, I bet.”_

_“You saying something about people with green eyes and gold fur, Alister?” he asked mildly, and Alister smirked right back._

_“I would never,” he drawled, then shrugged with his pen. “Jokes aside, he kinda sounds like a better-looking version of you as a kid, right?”_

_“Wh- no!”_

_“Deny it all you like, dreams are your mind trying to tell you something. I bet he’s what you want your inner child to be. Pay attention to what he’s doing next time – maybe it’s what your subconscious wants you to be doing.” He raised his eyebrows meaningfully before going back to his paperwork. “And by the way, if you start seeing a white-furred kid in your dreams, I don’t care what else is happening, you figure out how to lucid dream and leave me out of it, alright? You’re already too obsessed with me as it is.”_

_Kaden violently kicked his desk, earning a snigger from his friend._

 

* * *

 

He only had a second of staring out at the horizon before something blasted past his line of sight and his battle training kicked in. He ducked and rolled, coming up next to the closest solid object for cover. Then he stared around, finding himself in some kind of warehouse getting blasted to smithereens.

The boy was back, this time dressed in full armour, though it wasn’t lombax make. He was reloading a multi-rocket launcher and looking mildly annoyed by the shots still firing overhead and against their shelter.

“Just drop off this package for me, simple little errand, a thousand bolts for you if you do,” he was muttering. “A thousand bolts my—”

“Ratchet!” a tinny voice warned from somewhere behind the boy.

“—I’m just saying, this is not a thousand bolt job. I better get some kinda upgrade for this,” he snarled over his shoulder, and then lifted the rocket launcher into position.

He turned, revealing the robot from the last dream had folded in on itself and was hanging on the boy’s back like a backpack. Once again, it seemed to notice Kaden, and narrowed its eyes at him. He stared back, wondering if he could speak to it and get an answer, but wasn’t given time.

The boy rocked on the balls of his feet once, twice, and then, on the third time, threw himself out from behind the cover and started firing. Kaden twisted so he could poke his head out and watch, but almost wished he hadn’t.

There were at least ten creatures out there, all heavily armed and armoured, and Kaden knew his commander wouldn’t have sent him out there without at least two team mates. But the boy was alone, simply dancing back and forth to avoid the shots, letting his armour take the brunt when he couldn’t, and firing rockets back with expert precision. He ran out of ammo and flung the launcher back, snatching two smaller guns from his side and immediately using them to positively rain laserfire against his enemies. Less precise, but the sheer number of volleys was more than enough to make up for it.

But no sooner had he cleared out the initial ten did a jet fly in overhead, slowing just enough for another wave of armoured commandos to drop in. The boy growled lowly and reached behind himself, under the robot. He threw out a grenade, but while the commandos all jerked back, it didn’t explode on impact.

It burst out into a disco ball. And suddenly, all fifteen of the new wave of enemies began dancing. Fairly well, at that.

The boy didn’t even hesitate before switching out his gun again, this time for a rifle easily longer than he was tall. And, without any mercy or hesitation, he shot each of the dancing commandos in the head with almost perfect accuracy.

Then, when the battlefield was empty, he paused just long enough to ensure no one else was coming before dashing into the field, some kind of magnet pulling shining bolts out of his victims and into a pouch on his back pocket. He searched all of them for ammo with ruthless efficiency, reloaded his weapons, and ran off.

As he went, Kaden realised the robot was still watching him quietly, and he stared back until he had to blink.

And found himself staring at his bedroom ceiling, freezing cold beneath his blankets.

 

* * *

 

“You insignificant, worthless, arrogant space rat!” snapped Kaden away from the stars even before he’d realised what he was looking at. He swung around to find the boy staring down a ridiculously oversized robot. It took Kaden a moment to realise the insults were coming from a strange slug-like alien perched on the very top of it, half-hidden behind a control panel. “You should have given up years ago, and just gone to die among the fossils of your kind.”

The boy actually rolled his eyes, as if the whole speech was hackneyed and overdone. “Can we get on with it, please?”

“Hah! You’d like that! But I’m not going to make this quick, space rat!” the slug creature sneered. “I’m going to take you down, but I’ll keep you alive. Alive and helpless, so you can watch as I strip your little sidekick down for parts, and melt the rest of him for scrap!”

Almost too fast for Kaden to track, the boy snatched out a blaster and pointed it at the slug creature’s face. “You can _try_.”

And then, the battle was on. Kaden tried to stay back, but more than a few stray shots from both the robot and boy came too close for comfort. Nothing hit, thankfully, but he felt the heat from a few explosions and bullets ruffled his fur as they blasted by him. Still, he couldn’t look away.

He’d seen the boy in battle before, known from the first dream that he knew his way around weaponry, but this was… horrifying. He was fast and flexible, flipping and twisting like a champion gymnast as he danced around the robot, doing double-jumps that made the muscles in Kaden’s back and hips twinge in sympathetic protest, avoiding limbs the size of small trucks and explosions that could have flipped tanks. All the while, he shot volley after volley of what seemed to be a full arsenal of weapons. Guns, lasers, grenades, rockets… Crates around them splintered under the force of the battle, revealing bolts and ammo that the boy snatched up and loaded without even pausing to breathe. The little robot on his back transformed itself into a jet pack, but rarely did more than boost him into triple-jumps or slow his descents when he clambered too high to judge distance.

The little slug thing gloated, screamed, and tried to banter, but the boy didn’t say a word to respond. The robot occasionally warned for danger, or noted when a weapon was ready to fire at full power, but even then, the boy only said a short word or two of thanks or soldier-like acknowledgement before refocussing completely on the task at hand.

Eight minutes, the battle raged until, finally, the robot was unable to hold its weight under all the damage the boy had inflicted, and crumbled to the ground. Still, the boy didn’t hesitate, leaping up onto the robot’s arm to sprint all the way up to the slug’s platform, where he finally stopped, holding his gun to the creature’s head.

“Stay. Down,” he ordered, and the slug lifted its hands in surrender.

“Okay. Okay, you win.”

“Yeah,” he panted, finally letting some of his exhaustion show. “Yeah, I do. Clank?”

“I am sending word to the Galactic Rangers now,” the robot said. “However, we still need to disable the security system before they will be able to get into the hangar.”

“No, Clank, we don’t need to do that,” he said, pressing the gun a little closer to the slug creature’s head. “Slaggit here’s gonna do that for us.”

The slug opened its mouth to respond, but the boy leaned down before it could, out of Kaden’s sight. “And if he tries to press self-destruct or any of the turrets instead, I’m gonna blow his brains out.”

Kaden shoved himself up out of bed, startling the poor girl next to him awake. But he didn’t even acknowledge her, sprinting for the bathroom to throw up his dinner.

That kid was a one-man armada.

 

* * *

 

It was quiet, the next time he found himself staring at the horizon. The sky was mostly a deep purple, fading from a fiery sunset to a dark night, and he could see the twinkling of city lights in the distance. He, however, was standing on a rocky outcropping, a soft light coming from behind him.

Able to recognise the feeling of one of these dreams, he slowly turned, prepared for anything.

But all he found was the boy sitting on a bench, a markazian girl curled around him as they stared out at the sunset. The little robot was sitting nearby, flipping through a book with its eyes lighting up the pages.

The boy was older than the last time Kaden had been able to take a good look at him, but still not what you’d call an adult. He seemed to have stacked on a bit of weight—the good kind—moving him out of rake-thin to just slim. And if Kaden hadn’t watched him tear his way through a giant killer robot last night, he never would have believed such a cute kid could hurt so much as a fly.

“I have to go back to work soon,” the girl murmured. “Sasha needs an escort.”

The boy hummed but didn’t otherwise react, even when she snuggled a little closer to his side, nuzzling against his ear.

“Do you want to come? I’m sure the commander will okay it if you want to come back from leave early.”

He smirked. “Nah. I’ll let you girls talk about me behind my back for a few weeks.”

“Coward,” she teased, but then closed her eyes, relaxing into him. He smiled and shifted his head against her, nuzzling back, and Kaden turned away.

He rolled over in bed, glancing at the clock to confirm he didn’t need to be awake yet, and buried himself in more normal dreams.

 

* * *

 

_Normally, Kaden could appreciate Sal’s professionalism. She believed in the integrity of the government’s confidentiality agreements, and that was something the entire Guard of Avoidables held in extremely high esteem. It was kind of their purpose for existing, after all._

_Today, however, he just wanted information._

_“There has to be something you can tell me,” he insisted. “I don’t need specifics, I just need confirmation. Are there any reports of a lombax in markazian territory?”_

_“You know I can’t tell you that, lieutenant,” she said wearily. “Markazian territory comes under subsection M-823, which requires Infiltration Level Security or higher.”_

_He sighed loudly, pressing his hands to his face and then back over his head to his ears. “But it’s about a lombax. Surely that grants an exception.”_

_“Not that I know of,” she said, and then folded her arms over the desk to frown at him. “Why are you so curious anyway, Kaden? You don’t usually care about anything outside the Guard.”_

_He stalled, not really sure how to explain it. On paper, his dreams sounded like something out a holo-vid. Some good looking kid single-handedly taking on entire battalions and world-destroying robots with an arsenal of weapons only to snuggle up to attractive female aliens as soon as the fighting stopped? He should go off-world and sell the creative rights – he’d never have to work again!_

_But something about the dreams just felt so real. And he’d never dreamed like this before. Never about the same unknown person, in different situations and scenarios. It didn’t make any sense._

_And if it was real, then… the very thought made him sick to his stomach. A kid. Not even fully grown, but a well trained, deadly soldier. and he had no idea whose side the kid was on. The robot had mentioned Galactic Rangers, but Kaden had never heard of them before. They could be good or bad. Either way, the High Council needed to know about him. They needed to be prepared._

 

* * *

 

The ground underfoot was rocky, with sand everywhere. He lifted his boot and took an awkward step backward, unnerved by finding himself staring at dirt before anything else.

“Aw, come on, kitty! I thought you wanted to play!”

He looked up at the child’s voice, already scowling. ‘Kitty’ was a common insult for lombaxes – the idea of a _child_ already using it was infuriating.

He didn’t recognise the species, but the group of children in front of him were all the same. Scaly green, without tails or hair, and bulbous heads. They were grinning up into the branches of a tree, and Kaden slowly looked up to find a tiny lombax child clinging to the trunk above.

Gold fur and green eyes. His stripes had started to come in, but they were indistinct, marking him around five. He smiled down at the others like an emperor surveying his subjects. “I am playing,” he said. “Just because you can’t catch me, that’s not _my_ problem.”

“Ah, leave him. Stupid cat’s probably stuck up there anyway,” one of the children sneered.

“Yeah, hope you’re not hungry, kitty!” another one called. “No one’s gonna come get you!”

“Heh – let’s tell the teachers he ran into the city! He’ll get in so much trouble!”

Kaden watched the brats run off, then turned to look back up at the boy. He was watching them go with a quickly darkening expression, but said nothing. He just curled in closer to the trunk, and closed his eyes.

After a moment, Kaden followed suit.

 

* * *

 

The wall was made of iron, and covered in very simple schematics. Designs for ships, tools, even some kind of shirt that sent electric currents down the sleeves. He reached out, running his fingers over them as memories of his own youthful designs echoed. He’d leaned more toward weaponry in his youth, but he’d always been meant for the guard.

“Five _hundred_ bolts? Where the heck am I supposed to get that kind of money?”

“What’s the matter, kid, too good to work for the things you want?”

Kaden turned to see his boy—maybe thirteen, this time, if the shape of his feet were any indication—glaring at an older, purple-scaled creature holding an omniwrench. It clearly wasn’t lombax make – it didn’t have the power cabling to make it a real weapon. But it was big enough and heavy enough to make do. The boy pressed a hand to his temple before flinging it out. “C’mon, Lavel! That wrench cost two-fifty when I saw it in your shop last week!”

“And now it’s five hundred. What d’you want from me?”

“A fair deal!”

“Call it inflation,” he sneered. “Besides, you managed to buy this place, didn’chya? I’m not buyin’ that you can’t come up with a few hundred bolts.”

“You know what I had to do to get here!” the boy snarled back. “I don’t have that kind of money!”

“Then you ain’t gettin’ the wrench. Unless you got some other way to pay me for it.”

The kid growled, fists clenching so hard they shook. “What do you want, Lavel?”

The creature smirked and pretended to inspect his nails. “Ohh, well, you know… the city just contracted me to clean out the sewers of a few glowmites… Thing is, I’m not much of one for tight spaces, or the refuse this city flushes down them. Scrawny kitten like you, though… I bet you’d fit in just right down there.”

The boy’s growl deepened, his eyes almost slits. “Wrench up front.”

“You got a deal. But I hear even one o’those glowmites escapes, you don’t get t’keep it, you understand me?”

The boy snatched the omniwrench out of the creature’s hands and stalked off.

Kaden just turned away from the deal, and pulled his sheets higher up over his head.

 

* * *

 

“Keep them off me, I need to repair the door!”

Kaden flinched, barely given time to realise he was dreaming before he needed to duck out of the way of a spinning razorblade aimed at his head. He vaulted for safety behind a massive silver robot before peeking out again, searching for the boy and taking in the mess he’d found himself in this time.

His boy was standing at a door panel, prying open the top panel only to immediately dive into the guts. Around him, a small army of bug-like machines were crawling out of the walls and floor, each one inexpertly picked off by a blast from the robot Kaden was hiding behind.

“Agh!”

Kaden flinched and looked back at his boy. It was crazy to realise, but he’d never heard the boy in pain before. But the robot wasn’t firing fast enough. The machines were swarming. And the boy only reared back, out of the way of the one to bite him, before leaning back in to his repair, kicking another machine away from his ankle.

Kaden’s hand flexed for his wrench. Or a blaster. Something. But he had nothing. He wasn’t here. He wasn’t even sure he could impact the world around him. All he could do was stare helplessly as the massive robot barely kept the little machines at bay, each shot rocking the boy where he stood, too close to the explosions for comfort.

“Okay, that’s it, let’s go!” the boy cried as a door slid open. He snatched his wrench out and swung the last of the robots away, then ran back, reaching out a hand. The massive robot stepped forward, shrinking as it went, until it became the tiny backpack Kaden could recognise it as. It grabbed the boy’s hand and swung easily up into place on his back, and only then did it seem to notice Kaden.

It narrowed its eyes again, but wasn’t given time to say a word as his boy sprinted out of the now open door.

 

* * *

 

_“Veldin,” Kaden whispered, stepping back from the holo-monitor to just stare at the planet. It had taken weeks of searching in his off-time, combing through countless files on all the known species in the universe, until he finally found what he was looking for. Scaled creatures with big heads and no tails. Native to a desert planet in a nearby galaxy. “He grew up on Veldin.”_

_Alister stepped up beside him, frowning at the planet and then at his friend. “You’re sure you want to do this, Kaden? I mean… they’re just dreams.”_

_“I have to find him,” he murmured, just staring. “I have to know he’s real.”_

 

* * *

 

He heard the panting before he became aware of the stars he was staring at. He hesitated, then turned to look, fists clenching at the sight behind him.

His boy was curled up under a nest of blankets, the markazian girl crouched in front of him with her hand to his forehead. The little robot stood to the side, watching worriedly.

“M-maybe we should call Dr Croid?” the girl asked. “I mean, s-sure, he’s crazy and d-doesn’t think Ratchet’s a person, b-but maybe he’ll know what’s wrong. Maybe he’ll know how to fix it?”

“I’m…” the boy pushed a hand out from under the blanket to wave at her vaguely. “I’m fine. It’s probably just… just like allergies. I just… I need some… some sleep.”

“You are not fine!” she cried desperately. “The doctor didn’t even have a clue what was wrong! I can’t – Clank, tell him!”

“I am certain Ratchet will be fine given some time and rest. He has simply been pushing himself too hard lately,” the robot said, and Kaden glanced around only to find it staring at him. It made sure he was paying attention before looking back at the girl and gesturing to the door. “I will go and fetch some more pain killers. You should stay here and ensure he does not attempt to assemble any nuclear weapons.”

“Feelin’ the… love there… buddy,” the boy mumbled.

“Again,” the robot added pointedly.

“It was a _bath toy_ ,” he grumbled, but it trailed off into a pleased mumble when the girl reached out to pet his ears.

The robot headed for the door, and after a moment, Kaden followed. The door shut behind him, and the robot fixed him with a surprisingly good death glare.

“His temperature is too high, but he feels freezing. He cannot hold food down, and even the blanket irritates his skin with a rash. Through _fur_. He is in constant pain. Nanotech only worsens the inflammation. You will tell me what is wrong with him.”

“You _can_ see me,” Kaden realised quietly.

“That is beside the point,” it replied. “You are a lombax, are you not?”

“Of course.”

“Is this a lombax illness?”

“It…” He looked back at the door. “It _sounds_ like gravel mumps. But he’s way too old for it – most kids catch it before they even start school, and you can’t get it twice.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an infection. A kind of fungus that gets into the nervous system,” he explained. “You should get him to Fastoon – I’m pretty sure lombax doctors are the only ones that have the treatment handy.”

“That is not surprising, given lombax secrecy,” the robot said coldly. “Will he recover without treatment?”

“What?” he demanded. “You can’t do that. Gravel mumps put most kids in tears for a week – with salves! Leaving him untreated is torture.”

“We do not have another option,” it snapped. “There are no lombax doctors. How do we manage his pain?”

“You – what do you mean, there are no lombax doctors?” he asked. “Where are you?”

“The better question is _when_. Now answer my question. How do I help Ratchet?”

“You – you can’t, it – Look, we’ve been using the same salves for generations, and there are pills. But mostly kids just have to suffer through it…” He rubbed his temple, unable to get past the ‘no lombax doctors’ concept. His own medical knowledge had stopped in high school classes, but he gave it a shot. “I heard it’s worse for adults, but that’s more about the consequences than the symptoms. Sterility and such. Otherwise… Fur irritates the inflammation. You can lessen some of the pain by shaving it, but shaving over a rash isn’t something I’d advise if he isn’t knocked out. And you need to manage his temperature – the fever needs to break, but if it gets too high while his nervous system’s in a fragile state, it could permanently damage his brain. Keep his hands and feet cool, and don’t let him fold his ears. That’s… about all you can do.”

The robot stared at him for a few seconds, then turned away, clenching its little hands. “We never should have gone back to Fastoon. I should have been more firm with him. This is all my fault.”

“Look, if you know where Fastoon is, just go back there again,” he snapped. “It doesn’t matter where he was raised – he’s a lombax, and that means his people will take care of him. Get him to a doctor!”

“There are no lombax doctors!” the robot said again. “Fastoon is a dead planet – a museum of empty buildings and ghost streets! And apparently dangerous fungus in the water. Oh, Ratchet…!”

Next thing Kaden knew, he was jerking upright in the passenger seat of his ship and meeting Alister’s startled gaze.

 

* * *

 

His boy’s name was Ratchet.

Kaden hadn’t thought about it too much, but it suddenly came to him as he found himself staring out a window at a blue sky, listening to shuddering breath behind him. That’s what they kept calling him – the girl, the robot… they called him Ratchet.

He was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and obviously trying to fight off the tears streaming down his cheeks. His fingers, so rarely seen outside of those ridiculous gloves, were caught in the holes his nails had torn in the sheets. As Kaden walked over, he was able to see the fevered glaze over his boy’s normally bright eyes. The rash was visible through the paler fur around his muzzle and chest.

Kaden slowly sat on the chair last occupied by the markazian girl, and tried reaching out. As he’d suspected, he couldn’t touch. His hand slipped through his boy’s ear like a hologram.

“It’s okay, boy,” he whispered. “I promise this will pass in time. You have to be strong.”

What had the robot meant about there being no lombax doctors? About Fastoon being a dead planet? What was he seeing and why?

His boy was so small. He looked like he was older again… his ears had grown to be almost comically large, just as Kaden’s had before his final growth spurt. But even at what, twenty-five? The boy was tiny. Barely five feet tall, and still thin. What little weight he had seemed to be muscle. Not surprising, given everything Kaden had seen him do, but it wasn’t what a kid was supposed to look like.

And young adults were not supposed to suffer an illness most lombaxes caught and dealt with when they were young enough to cry without shame.

“I want to meet you one day, Ratchet,” he said. “So you have to be strong and make it through this. So we can meet up then.”

 

* * *

 

“I hate everything.”

Kaden smiled as he turned away from the window, pleased to finally hear Ratchet speak after a week of dreams about his boy in delirious pain. Unfortunately, he was still dreaming of Ratchet in his sickbed, but the boy was finally sitting up and glaring at a bowl of soup.

“You have said that many times today,” the robot noted. “It does not excuse you from eating.”

“I hate eating.”

“If you do not eat using your own power, I will bring Talwyn in here,” the robot said imperiously. “She will make you eat.”

“I hate Talwyn,” he grumbled, and glared at the little robot. “And I hate you too.”

“I suspect I would be more upset by this if I had not spent two weeks concerned you were going to die,” it replied. “Now please eat.”

“The bad mood comes with the recovery phase,” Kaden told the robot. “The pain should mostly be gone, but the rash is gonna itch like crazy for another week or so. He’ll get over it.”

“He always does,” the robot replied without turning, and the boy looked up from under his brows.

“Who always does what?”

“Nothing. Now, will you eat, or do I need to bring in Talwyn?”

The boy scowled but reluctantly picked up his spoon. He poked at the soup a few times before managing to scoop a mouthful. Obviously he hadn’t regained his appetite, but the idea of being force fed was less appealing than doing it himself.

“When you are done eating, you should try taking a bath—”

“Hate baths.”

“—we discovered, last week, that adding juice of the corivian plant to the water soothes your skin. You quite enjoy it.”

Kaden raised his eyebrows. “You do know corivian fumes are a euphoric depressant to lombaxes.”

The robot jerked, and Kaden’s eyebrows rose even higher. “You’ve been getting this kid stoned all week. I see.”

“Well, it seemed to work, anyway,” the robot said vaguely, then continued. “If you are feeling better after that, I thought it would be nice to take a walk. You need to rebuild your strength after such a long time in bed.”

“Hate walking. Hate the bed. I hate everything.” And then the kid suddenly froze, staring at nothing for a second before his head snapped around to stare at the robot. “You _bathed_ me? I didn’t just dream that, you actually bathed –?!”

“Of course. It has been over a week since you were fully conscious. You have been delirious, and the sweat from your hands and feet dirtied the blankets, which in turn irritated your skin further. We often needed to –”

“No! That was a dream!” he insisted. “Talwyn did not have anything to do with me being bathed. That was a _dream_.”

The robot tilted its head in confusion. “I do not understand why you are upset by this. It is not as if –”

“Oh my god, it really happened,” The boy put aside the bowl and disappeared under the blanket. “I’m never coming out. Kill me now.”

The robot turned to look up at Kaden, who shrugged. “Honestly, if my girlfriend gave me a sponge bath and I wasn’t aware enough to enjoy it, I’d probably wanna do that too.”

 

* * *

 

_Veldin was a desert planet. There wasn’t much to it._

_He wasn’t as surprised as Alister expected him to be. The last week of dreams had given him the hint that if what he was dreaming about was real, then at the very least, it wasn’t in his time. And even if it had been, it didn’t seem like Ratchet had stayed there too long._

_More important to him now was that there were no lombaxes. Not on this planet, or even apparently in the entire system._

_So how had his boy ended up here?_

_When would he been born? To what parents? Who took care of him, beyond the little robot?_

_Alister stepped up beside him as they stared out over a plateau below. “So, Kaden. The kid’s not here. Probably never was. Can we go home? What do you want to do now?”_

_“I think I need to talk to a dimensional physicist,” he murmured, gripping his wrench. He needed to find his boy._

 

* * *

 

He looked down from the sky to see a younger Ratchet alone, crouched over an engine and quietly fixing it. It felt like it had been a long time since he’d dreamt of something so peaceful.

Kaden moved over to crouch on the other side of the engine, just looking at the kid.

“Who are you?” he asked quietly.

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. He didn’t know Kaden was there. He just carried on with what he was doing.

Kaden woke up staring at the wall in front of him, and then sighed and got up.

 

* * *

 

Once again, Kaden didn’t have time to realise he was staring at space before noise broke into his dream. But not weaponsfire, this time. Just the shattering of a thrown glass.

“I’m not a cazar!” Ratchet yelled. “Stop pretending I am!”

“You’re close enough!” It was the cazar girl. But this time there was no attraction between them. They both looked hurt and angry. “The only thing stopping you from being one of us is you!”

“No kidding!” he shot back. “What do you think it is, the ears? The eyes maybe?”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“It’s what it is!”

“You’re being irrational!” she snapped. “Who cares if you have a few different features? You’re still a felid! You’re close enough to pass!”

“Pass? _Pass_?” Ratchet slammed his fists on the table between them. “I don’t want to pass, Sasha! And even if I did, you’re delusional if you think anyone would ever think I’m one of you!”

“That’s not what this is about anyway.”

“No, it’s about you constantly telling me to act like someone I’m not.”

“I don’t want you to act like anyone!” she insisted. “I want you to be _happy_. What is wrong with that?”

“Oh, and just because I don’t make some stupid noise you don’t think I’m happy?”

“Would you drop the purring for one second, that’s got nothing to do with it!” she snapped, and pointed at him savagely. “I’m talking about the fact you never relax! You don’t do anything for you! You wouldn’t even let me take you out for dinner without me telling you _I_ needed a night out!”

“Maybe I just don’t like eating at some fancy restaurant, you ever think about that?” he shot back. “You ever think maybe the reason I don’t want to do the stuff you say I should enjoy is because I know what I enjoy and it’s not any of that stuff?”

“No, because I know what you enjoy. You enjoy getting shot at!”

“Yeah, maybe I do! Saving people is what I enjoy, Sasha. It’s kind of my thing!”

“Oh, please, you never got into this to save anyone! You’re just hoping someone gets a stray shot in!”

“Screw you!”

“And the hell with you!”

“Fine!” he yelled, shoving himself away from the table. “See ya ’round!”

“Ohh, no, we are not finished here!” she said darkly. “You are not running away from this.”

“What else is there to say? You think I’m suicidal! Why the hell would I care what you want?” he snapped, stalking across the room. “ _I_ want to go home!”

“I can’t believe you! All that time you spent alone and now you’re pushing away anyone that cares about you!”

“Do _not_ –!” he yelled, spinning around with one finger raised. He stalled, then slowly lowered his arm again. “Do not talk like you understand _anything_ about my being alone.”

For a moment, they could only stare at each other, angry and hurt and separated as you could only be when arguing with someone you cared about.

“I love you,” the girl ground out. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You never had me,” Ratchet replied quietly, and left.

“Don’t!” Kaden cried, grabbing at the thin air over his bed. He stared at his empty fist for a second, then collapsed back against the pillow, breathing hard.

 

* * *

 

For once, he wasn’t staring into space, or at a wall, or anything much at all when he became aware of Ratchet in front of him. Maybe he’d been looking at the horizon past Ratchet and the cazar girl, but his attention quickly focussed.

Ratchet was leaning against an archway, legs and arms crossed, ears lowered and tail flicking behind him. The girl stood on the opposite side, her arms folded over her stomach.

“Sorry I yelled at you,” Ratchet said finally. “And… you know… left. The way I did.”

“I’m sorry I said all that stuff,” she said. “I just… I just want to see you happy. Happy like you make me.”

Ratchet sighed, lifting his eyes to the ceiling above, before lowering back to the ground. Eventually he looked at her again. “You do, you know? Make me happy.”

“No, I don’t,” she said softly, and when he lifted his head to argue, she just smiled sadly. “I don’t, Ratchet. Not as happy as I think you could be… with someone else.”

He immediately turned back to her, eyes wide. “What?”

She hesitated, bouncing in place for a few seconds and pulling her lips into her mouth. She tightened her arms around her waist and blinked several times, but nothing she did could hide the sharp breath she had to take to stop herself from crying. “You’re right, I mean… I have been trying to make you into something you’re not. I… I mean, think about it. I want to settle down, start some kind of… political career, and you… you’re not that guy.”

“What guy?” he asked. “What – what does your job have to do with –”

“You need to be out there,” she said, gesturing to the horizon Kaden might have been looking at. “With Clank, and the Galactic Rangers, and… all the bad guys there are. It’s who you are, Ratchet. You can’t be here with me.”

The boy peeked at her from the corner of his eye, then lowered his gaze back to the ground. She sniffed, wrapping her arms tighter around her waist, then said, “I think I’m always gonna love you, but… this is done. We’re done, Ratchet.”

His head turned a little toward her, but he didn’t say anything. Kaden wished he knew the kid well enough to know why. But the girl apparently did, because she took it as enough of a response to cross the archway and lean down to press her lips against the side of Ratchet’s mouth.

“Take care of the Phoenix for me,” she whispered, and walked away.

The boy just stood there as she left. Long after she was gone, he slowly slid down to sitting, elbows propped on his knees as he stared past Kaden.

Eventually, he pulled out a blaster, and just looked at it for a long time. Then he seemed to shrug to himself, a small smile on his face. “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

_Dimensional physicists were generally a strange bunch. They walked a very thin line between the real and the theoretical, knowing all their science had real applications but unable to test most of them because it could cause the end of the universe._

_As a Guard of the Avoidables, it had always been Kaden’s job to keep an eye on them. Whenever they got funding (or didn’t) to bring one of their ideas to life, it inevitably ended up in his care. So he understood the basics of what they did, and was—for the most part—on good terms with them all._

_So they did him the honour of listening carefully when he told them about the dreams. About how real they were. About how he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Ratchet was out there somewhere. And that he needed to know why he was seeing visions of him every night._

_“When did all this start?” one of them asked._

_Honestly, Kaden couldn’t quite remember, but he had a vague idea. “I think it was when we brought in those artefacts from sector nine-two-four.”_

_They all hummed and exchanged knowing looks._

 

* * *

 

“Son of a _Qwark_!”

Kaden tried not to smile at the unusual expression as he shifted up on his elbows to see Ratchet standing in the middle of a body-strewn battlefield, wringing his fingers like he’d snapped them in a door.

“What is wrong, Ratchet?” the robot on his back asked curiously, and the boy huffed.

“Zapped myself with my _frikking_ thunder-blazer.”

“Is that not why you wear gloves?”

“Leather gloves don’t do anything against electricity,” he snapped, dancing in place like that would help him get over it.

It should have been horrifying, such an amusing, casual scene in the middle of all this death and destruction. It was horrifying. But Kaden kept his eyes on the boy. Older, again. Taller too. Almost full-grown now.

He felt the strangest twinge of pride.

 

* * *

 

He quickly focussed his eyes away from the stars and onto the reflection of the window, noting his boy was almost directly behind him for once, watching a group of people gathered across some kind of command centre. The attention seemed to be focussed on a hulking, furless creature in green latex.

“—and then, we all regroup back here for waffles and celebration before reporting in to the Galactic President, who will no doubt reward me for my brilliant strategy and heroism!”

Ratchet lowered his head into his palm, and said, too quietly for anyone but Kaden and the robot to hear, “So once again, his plan is ‘send Ratchet and Clank in to almost certain death and take all the credit if they survive’?”

“I suppose we could be flattered he has so much confidence in our abilities,” the robot replied lightly.

“Ughhh…” He pulled his head up and raised his voice, “Qwark, stupid question: what are the rest of you going to be doing while I’m uh… diverting enemy attention?”

“Monitoring the situation, of course!” the big lug announced. “Don’t you worry your fuzzy little head about it, Ratchet! I wouldn’t leave my favourite sidekick unsupervised!”

“Great,” Ratchet said, lowering his head again. “Just great.”

Kaden rubbed his own face as he dragged himself from sleep, and then frowned. It was the first time he’d seen Ratchet show any kind of reluctance to fight. He wondered if it was normal, or if it had been this time in particular, before shrugging it off and getting up.

 

* * *

 

Another night, another battle, and Kaden sighed as he dove behind a stack of crates. He’d been engaged in his own fight today – a thief broke into the Hall of Invincibles, and it took him all too long to break past the stolen armour to get at the thief himself. He had hoped tonight’s dream would be peaceful.

Instead, he had only just begun to search out the boy when Ratchet was bodily thrown through the crates Kaden was hiding behind. He lay there for a moment, just breathing, before flipping back to his feet and drawing a new weapon.

The robot wasn’t on his back for once, but when Kaden turned to watch the boy run back into battle, he saw it shooting its own massive gun alongside another, taller robot and the hulking creature from the last dream. They were facing off against another ridiculously oversized robot. This one appearing closer to a squid than anything else, but with a massive blue holoshield blocking its front.

The robot side-eyed Ratchet as he joined them in leaping over a laser attack. “Ratchet, your nanotech is low. Perhaps you should take cover.”

“We’re almost done,” he panted. “We need to take down that shield!”

“I’ve got it!” the hulk proclaimed, and switched out his blaster for what looked suspiciously like a vacuum. The other three jerked, but that was all they had time for before the vacuum actually sucked Ratchet up against the mouth with a startled yelp.

“Qwark,” the boy said warningly, “remember to aim. _Remember_ to _aim_!”

Kaden wasn’t sure whether he aimed. Either way, Ratchet was shot, yelling the whole way, up to a wall high above their heads. He hit metal, and then jumped back just enough to gain air again before slamming his wrench down on a platform Kaden couldn’t see. He then leapt down, just barely giving himself enough time to vault another laser blast before he was sucked up into the taller robot’s vacuum as well. “H-hey!”

“Trust me!” the robot sneered.

Kaden didn’t.

And yet the process was repeated, and this time, the holoshield vanished. The four of them immediately opened up enough firepower to level a small city, until eventually the bot faltered, fell back, and then went crashing out of sight.

“Victory!” the tall robot screeched. “Evil always triumphs!”

Ratchet and the smaller robot turned to give it matching deadpan stares, completely ignoring the smaller robots still skittering around the edge of the battlefield. Ratchet even holstered his gun, switching it out for his omniwrench. “Y’know, Nefarious, just when I think we’re getting somewhere with you, you go and –”

And then he got shot in the back.

“Ratchet!” the little robot cried as he crumpled, while the tall one smirked.

“My day just got a whole lot better!”

If it hadn’t been a dream, Kaden would have thrown his wrench at the robot’s head. As it was, he woke up in an exceedingly bad mood.

 

* * *

 

_Joen pressed her hands together as she considered everything he’d told her. “They certainly don’t sound like dreams. But I’m not sure what you’re suggesting is possible.”_

_“If they’re not dreams, what other explanation is there?” he asked bluntly. “They’re clearly some kind of vision, seen though a mental connection to some kind of… warp hole. The only question is whether it’s from another time or place.”_

_“There is another question: what caused the connection.”_

_“Honestly, given my line of work it could have been any number of things,” he pointed out. “Not everything in the Avoidables works the way they’ve been catalogued to.”_

_“Very true,” she said, and paused to consider him for another moment before sitting forward again. “Unfortunately, until we have the answers to some of these questions, there isn’t much we can do to help you. My next suggestion is to share the dreams, in the hope that we may be able to find some kind of clue.”_

_“A dreamoscope?” he asked with a wince. Once upon a time, dreamoscopes had been sold off the shelf – a way to share dreams with friends. But the problem was that very few people could control what they dreamed, and having a record of some dreams turned out to be bad for many relationships. Now they were only used by psychiatrists and the black market._

_Joen smiled, obviously guessing at the reason for his reluctance. “I’m sure we can let you review the tapes before anyone else looks at them.”_

 

* * *

 

He was staring at a dark ceiling, soft snores echoing around him.

He turned his head, slightly unnerved to find himself less than a foot from the sleeping Ratchet, who didn’t appear to be wearing anything under his twisted sheets, except for the equally undressed markazian draped over his back. What his boy saw in non-lombax women, Kaden could not for the life of him understand. At least the cazar had fur! Markazians were just…

He grimaced and turned away, wondering once again why he saw the glimpses of Ratchet’s life that he did. There was no order to it. No rhyme or reason. No –

Ratchet suddenly gasped, jerking violently and startling Kaden into attention and the poor girl awake. He stared blindly for a few seconds, reaching for something that wasn’t there, until the markazian realised what had happened and pressed back into his shoulder.

“It’s okay, Ratchet. We’ll find him,” she breathed, moving her arm from where it had been resting against his hip to curl around his chest instead. Her fingers spread into his fur, and she shifted a little further over him before kissing the back of his neck, close to his ear. “It’s okay. You’re not alone; I’m here, and we’re gonna find him. I promise.”

“Tal,” he whispered vaguely, and she hummed, nuzzling into him.

“M’here, Ratchet.”

“Okay,” he said, closing his eyes again and shifting his own hand up onto the bed where it could wrap around hers. “Okay.”

“Okay,” she agreed.

Soon, they were both asleep again, while Kaden woke up instead.

 

* * *

 

He was staring out into empty space, a strange rock station playing music he didn’t recognise. He looked around the cockpit, noting Ratchet in the pilot seat, with no little robot or female companion. Just his boy, silently multi-tasking between checking his scanning instruments and flying the ship.

He was at the age Kaden saw him most frequently – his early twenties, after he apparently discovered shirts outside armour but before his ears started off his final growth spurt. And this, Kaden realised as he looked around the cockpit again, was a lombax ship. It had a few features Alister probably would have drooled over, but the controls were worn, with signs of age creeping along the edges. Another point for ‘time’ being the victim of the warp hole he was apparently looking through.

Despite his focus, Ratchet seemed tired in this dream. Tired and a little frustrated. The way Alister sometimes looked after a long day of arguing with other politicians. As Kaden watched, Ratchet rubbed his face, then pushed his hand back over one ear, folding it flat against his head with a sigh that could only be described as world-weary.

He stayed that way for a few seconds, then rubbed his face again, with both hands this time, and then paused again, hands pressed against his temples so Kaden couldn’t see his face. He thought he heard a sniff, and short breath.

Was Ratchet… crying?

The radio died, and a mechanical female voice took its place. “Ratchet.”

He paused, then made a soft coughing noise, before his voice came out as strong as ever. “Yeah. Here.”

“If I might make an observation—”

“I’m fine, Aphelion.”

“Of course,” the voice said, in the tone of all exasperated women everywhere. “—you are simply tired. You have not taken a break since leaving Apogee Station two days ago. You should rest.”

Ratchet shifted slightly – not enough to show his face, but enough to be more resting his head on the sides of his hands than using them to hide. “Speaking of which, how pissed are her messages sounding now?”

“She has calmed. Would you like to hear the most recent one?”

“Sure, why not.”

The next sound from the speakers was a sigh, and then, eventually, the markazian’s voice. “ _I don’t even know if you’re listening to these, Ratchet. If you are, I’m sorry. For… fuck it, for everything. It was out of line. I am… so proud of you for not giving up on him, it says so much about you and I am a horrible person for even suggesting you stop, it’s just…_ ” She sighed again. “ _It reminded me of how much I wish I could have found my father. How much I still want to find him. And I wish I was strong, like you, to keep looking, but I’m not. And, you know, I projected that on you. I’m sorry._ ” She took an audible breath, and her tone abruptly switched to something almost too upbeat as she changed subjects. “ _To make it up to you, and you’re gonna hate this, I got in contact with Qwark. I told him you could use a friend, and so he’s waiting for you to pick him up. I am going to add the coordinates for his pick-up location at the end of this message, and hopefully Aphelion will take you to him._ ”

“Bitch,” Ratchet said, with feeling that was equal parts annoyed and fond.

“ _We care about you and we’re worried. I know you want to find Clank, and I really, really hope you do. But it’s been two years, and I_ need _you to take care of yourself while you’re searching, okay?_ ” The girl paused before speaking again. “ _Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough for a message that may not get listened to, so… be safe, Ratchet. I’ll see you when you get back._ ”

The message shut off, and for a moment, everything was quiet except for the humming of the console. Ratchet took a shaky breath, then let it out in a long sigh.

“Don’t call, but… send a message back,” he instructed.

“Recording,” the robotic voice confirmed, but Ratchet didn’t immediately speak. It took almost thirty seconds before he did.

“Thanks, Tal. I’m sorry too.”

He reached out and pressed a button to end the recording, then bent further forward, curling close to his knees. “I’m sorry I’m such a fucking mess.”

Not even able to breathe, Kaden extended a hand, but his fingers slid right through Ratchet’s shoulder. It only felt worse when he blinked, and found himself reaching for his alarm clock instead.

 

* * *

 

As much as Kaden didn’t understand his visions, and didn’t exactly welcome them, he had never felt so much relief to dream of Ratchet again the next night.

Better still, Ratchet was clearly the same age as he had been in the last dream, only this time Kaden was hunched in the back of the ship, and the passenger seat was taken by the little robot. Ratchet was laughing.

“—and then, without so much as a change in vocal signature, he says ‘I have been meaning to fix that’,” the robot finished, and Ratchet burst out in a whole new peal of laughter, quickly trailing off into breathy giggles that could have been sobs if not for the grin on his face. The little robot gazed up at him, somehow looking extremely affectionate, and said nothing as Ratchet slowly calmed down.

Kaden gazed at him too, looking at the tight set of his shoulders and the weary look on his face. It was so strange. So much of what he saw in these visions were horrifying. Ratchet was horrifying. A child—he’d yet to see him fully grown—capable of utterly decimating small armies with nothing but a handful of weapons and a robot on his back. He’d never seen him interact with another lombax. Never seen him do anything _normal_.

And yet, each new vision made Kaden feel more and more affection for the kid. He wanted to know more. He wanted to meet him. He wanted to talk to him.

He wanted to ask what that moment had been about, when Ratchet had been alone.

“Thank you for helping with the repairs to the clock,” the little robot said finally. “I believe you saved the zoni quite a lot of time.”

Ratchet’s shoulders hunched for a moment before dropping again. “Least I could do.”

“I am sorry about what happened.”

He shook his head, all smiles gone. “You have nothing to apologise for. He… he did what he did, and… things happened like they happened. Nothing you – nothing _either_ of us could have done.”

“I am glad you see it that way,” the robot said. It carried a hint of ‘for once’ that Kaden didn’t really understand, but went unspoken anyway. Besides, it soon continued, “but all the same, I am sorry. For everything.”

Ratchet glanced at it, a half-smile on his lips, before he turned back to the stars. “It’s good to have you back, pal.”

“It is good to be back. There is nowhere I would rather be.”

Ratchet adjusted his grip on the controls, and didn’t say a word in response.

 

* * *

 

_Considering it had been her idea, Joen looked surprisingly sceptical as the doctor pressed the dreamoscope down over Kaden’s temples. Alister, leaning against the far wall with his arms folded, just looked amused._

_“Alright, Judge,” the doctor said slowly, “that should be it. You just need to make sure the recording box—” He pressed a small silver device into Kaden’s hands. “—is within a cubit of your bed while you’re sleeping, and it should pick up everything you see. When you’re reviewing the footage, it will be just like a standard holo-vid. You can cut anything that’s not relevant.”_

_“Or save them to another file for later viewing, if it’s saucy enough,” Alister added with a lecherous grin, and Kaden rolled his eyes. Ever the mature one, his friend._

_“I’d like at least seven recordings to verify the theory and conduct analysis,” said Joen. “So if you could report back in fourteen days, that should be more than enough to ensure a solid collection.”_

_“Anything in particular you think would help?” Kaden asked, touching the dreamoscope. It wasn’t too cumbersome – he could barely feel it through his fur, but it felt like he had oil or gum stuck to his head._

_“Technology, pop-culture, communication styles,” Joen suggested vaguely. “Anything to give us a concept of how this boy lives.”_

_“Understood. I’ll let you know if I run into trouble.”_

 

* * *

 

There was a white wall across the room, and a room full of orange-suited prisoners.

Kaden frowned and looked around, then did a double-take as he discovered Ratchet and his little robot both dressed in orange as well, living up with trays along a cafeteria wall.

Well. There went his good guy theory.

They were talking too quietly for him to hear from even his short distance away, but Kaden noticed a very large, angry-looking prisoner eyeing them off for almost a full minute before taking a purposeful step forward into Ratchet’s path. The collision was inevitable.

“Why donch’ya watch where you’re going, space rat?” the prisoner yelled, and Ratchet winced before quickly taking a step back. He was less the half the prisoner’s height and perhaps a quarter of his weight.

“Easy, pal, no one’s looking for any trouble,” he said gently, but two other prisoners stepped up to sneer alongside the first.

“General Glahm ain’t your pal, furball!”

“General Glahm ain’t got no pals!”

“Wait a second,” the first one said, leaning down to peer at Ratchet with one squinted eye. “Have we met?”

Judging by the suddenly innocent expression on Ratchet’s face, they absolutely had. “You know us space rats, we all look the same.” He turned a little with a smile that looked more like a grimace. “I think it’s something about the ears.”

Kaden raised an eyebrow. Lombaxes were the only ones with ears like them.

“Now I know!” the general yelled. “Krell Canyon, Planet Lumos! Am I right, fellas?”

“Oh, boy,” Ratchet sighed.

“Sweet eye of a zoni, that’s him!” one of the tagalongs cried.

“Fellas,” Ratchet began again, holding up his tray like a shield. “Let’s all just take it easy. You were invading a peaceful village, I had to do something—”

“Well, now so do we,” the general informed him. And that was all the warning he gave before ramming his fist for Ratchet’s face. Somehow, he got his tray up in time to block, and immediately retaliated by slamming it against the general’s jaw hard enough that Kaden was amazed something didn’t crack.

It didn’t help the situation any, however, as the general glared down at Ratchet. “Get him!”

In all his years, Kaden had never understood why some prisons let their prisoners carry weapons. Surely it was asking for trouble. But for once he was glad, as Ratchet pulled his wrench and pummelled it against his first new attacker’s head, before swinging it up and around to clock the second upside the jaw, flipping him right off his feet. But that was all the luck he had, as the general tackled him right in the gut and pinned him by the neck, fist raised for a new punch.

“Now I’ve got you, ya miserable –”

“Enough!”

They both looked up to find a wardenbot standing over them, flanked by two heavily armed enforcers. The wardenbot put its hands on its hips and demanded, “What is going on here?!”

“I know what this looks like,” Ratchet said, still trying to peel the general’s hands off his neck, “but I was actually winning this one.”

Kaden grumbled to himself as he rolled over, wondering what exactly was wrong with his boy to get himself into these situations.

 

* * *

 

“You. Again.”

Kaden blinked, becoming aware of the stars he was staring at a moment after hearing the accusation. He turned to find the little robot blankly staring at him over a fire, Ratchet beside him and hard at work… disembowelling a frog. Kaden pressed a hand to his mouth and tried to resist the urge to throw up.

“What’s that?” Ratchet asked, and the robot stared at him, then pointed at Kaden.

“Do you not see that?”

“See what?” He looked up, eyes tracking right past Kaden. “Trees? Bushes? Swamp gas?” He turned back to the robot with narrow, worried eyes. “Is this a zoni thing?”

The robot somehow blanched, then lifted one hand to tap at its metallic jaw. “Perhaps. It can be difficult to tell.”

“Okay, well…” Ratchet glanced at a spot a cubit to the left of Kaden’s hip. “You um… you wanna… I dunno, tell me about it, or something?”

“I do not know what there is to tell,” it said. “For the past several years, I have, on irregular occasions, seen a…” It stopped, looking at Ratchet for a long moment. It obviously decided to change what it had been about to say. “…figure. It appears to be watching you.”

“Well, that’s not creepy at all,” he said, and went back to the frog. “Since you never mentioned it, I’m guessing you don’t think it’s dangerous.”

“No. I do not think it has any say in the matter.”

He glanced up again, but more out of curiosity than concern. “If it starts growing horns, breathing fire, or telling you to kill me in my sleep, you let me know. Zoni thing or not, it wouldn’t hurt to get Al to check out your visual circuitry if you’re seeing things that aren’t there.”

“Your concern is truly touching, Ratchet,” it replied, then refocussed on Kaden. “Are you indeed there?”

“And now he’s _talking_ to the things that aren’t there,” Ratchet muttered playfully. “ _Great_.”

“I’m…” Kaden paused, walking around the fire to hide Ratchet’s work from himself and better see his boy. “I don’t know whether I’m here or not. This is a dream.”

“How strange,” the robot noted.

“Who is he?” he asked, kneeling down to look at Ratchet’s distracted face. “Why isn’t he with his family?”

The robot pulled back slightly, eyes narrowing in what almost looked like an expression. 

Kaden pressed his lips together, watching his boy work for a few moments, then sighed and looked at the robot instead. “Just tell me that. If nothing else, tell me where his family is. I need to find… something about this boy. Please.”

“Okay, that’s the gross bit done,” Ratchet said, and then held up the disembowelled frog just long enough to violently spear it on a long metal spike. He drove the other end of the spike into the dirt, angled to put the frog over the fire, and then let out a tired breath as he gathered the remains up in a plastic slip. “Be right back, Clank. Don’t let the imaginary creature eat my dinner.”

“I do not believe he is imaginary, nor capable of eating your food,” the robot replied, and Ratchet snorted.

“Yeah, well, either way.”

Without even thinking about it, Kaden got to his feet, ready to follow, only to trip in his sheets and hit the floor hard, groaning as he slowly woke up.

...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kind of know where this was going (it was only written and abandoned recently), but I stalled because I decided the format wasn't working for what I wanted. I also wasn't sure what Kaden would do with the information if he knew. So it trailed off, as these things do... If you can think of an outcome, please tell me!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I credit the fact that I came up with more to this entirely on a commenter who gave me very bad ideas. I almost think I have a plot here. I'm not sure yet, but I might...!

A crowd was cheering, chanting Ratchet’s name with dark interjections. Kaden shivered as he slowly pushed himself upright, something about the sound unnerving him despite the peaceful night’s sky overhead.

He looked around, frowning at the dark, rust-covered arena he found himself in. The concrete floor was littered with ammo shells and plasma residue, and after a moment he noticed little flying cameras overhead, swooping around and slowly focussing on a single point.

He couldn’t see Ratchet, but a bulky armoured figure was slowly making its way across the field, toward a fallen creature in an orange jumpsuit.

Kaden hesitated. This whole thing felt… wrong, somehow. Not just the cheering from nowhere, not just the cameras. The arena itself felt… He got to his feet and hurried over in time to see the figure’s helmet pull back to reveal Ratchet. Some easily distracted part of Kaden’s mind wondered what had happened to his tail.

“Stay down, Ace,” he said firmly, pulling Kaden’s full attention back to the moment. He almost sounded sad as he began to turn away. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”

“Embarrass?” the downed creature snapped, only to break off in pained coughs. “ _Embarrass_? I’m Ace Hardlight!”

“You were a hero once, Ace,” said Ratchet. Kaden glanced at him, then back down at the creature. The words seemed to have hit something inside, because it paused, lowering its eyes to the ground.

“Ratchet,” it called, in between coughs, “don’t let Vox… do to you what… he did to me.”

Kaden turned back to Ratchet, noting the two hulking robots already reaching for him, and the way his boy’s head and ears drooped in obvious surrender.

“You’re the hero now,” the creature gasped, and Ratchet let himself be carried off.

Kaden stayed where he was, looking back to the fallen creature as it curled into the concrete. Another robot was approaching, this one cocking a rifle.

He woke up before it could use it.

 

* * *

 

_“How goes the recording?” Alister asked as he flopped down on the couch, cracking open a creamer. “Any interesting tales of the Veldin Lombax?”_

_Kaden shrugged. Despite a few dreams since, of Ratchet competing in hoverboard races and losing poker (badly. Kaden was pretty sure Ratchet had no idea what his ears were doing most of the time), it was the dream from the arena that was sticking with him._

_He slowly put down the bowl of flakes he’d been carrying, and then sat down on the other side of the couch, opening his own drink. He took a long sip before speaking. “Does it bother you that I’ve killed people?”_

_Alister balked, actually pulling back a little before visibly forcing himself to relax. “Kaden, you’re a member of the Avoidables. It’s an expected part of your job.”_

_“Answer the question.”_

_He frowned, then sighed and put his drink down. “No, it doesn’t. Like I said, it’s your job. It’s not who you are. Besides, I’m fully trained as part of the Praetorian Guard, even if I haven’t seen a real battlefield yet. I know the techniques.” He paused again, eyeing him warily. “What’s this about? Did the kid from your dreams get mixed up in some kind of fight?”_

_“He’s a… mercenary, I think,” he explained. “A lot of my dreams are about battle.”_

_“Oh. Sorry to hear that,” he said, and picked up his drink again. “Wait, I thought you said he was a high schooler. What’s this about him being a mercenary?”_

_“That’s a good question, Alister,” he said wearily. “It’s been bothering me a lot lately.”_

 

* * *

 

Once again, Kaden found himself looking at schematics. He blinked at them a few times as his brain processed that he was in a dream, and that these designs made direct reference to nuclear fission and loose fur.

“I have to ask, Ratchet,” the cazar’s voice brought his attention to the room behind him, where Ratchet was sitting at a desk with an amused look on his face, and the cazar girl was inspecting a pair of boots with gears all over them. “Why do you have to modify literally everything you touch? These are boots. They go on your feet. Why did you have to add—”

“—speed boosters. To help me run faster,” he said blankly.

“How does adding rockets to heels make you faster?” she demanded.

He blinked, the logic apparently not reaching him. “Rockets make everything faster.”

She stared at him for a long few seconds, then apparently decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. “Can’t you pay someone to make… functional modifications for you? Surely Al could do it.”

Kaden shook his head and turned to the rest of the workshop. While he agreed Ratchet—like every teenage boy—seemed to favour ‘cool’ over ‘sense’ with his designs, it was like this woman had never met a lombax before. The idea of paying someone else to build what you could was just insulting.

“Egh, most of the bolts I earn adventuring go to weapons and armour,” Ratchet pointed out lazily. “RYNOs are not cheap.”

The cazar huffed. “Like you need them. I’ve seen you save cities with just a magna blaster and your wrench.”

Kaden looked around in time to see Ratchet give a would-be nonchalant shrug, the smug look on his face fooling no one. “Yeah, but RYNOs are cool.”

“And _illegal_ ,” she said, but her grin spoke volumes. She walked over to him, hips swaying far more than they needed to, and made a point of leaning down over him to put the boots down on the desk behind him. “Boys and their toys.”

He just kept smirking until she pushed forward to bite at his jaw, and Kaden shoved himself out of the dream with a shudder.

It didn’t matter if Ratchet was clearly strong enough to make his own decisions – he was still a kid, she was still an adult, and Kaden was _never_ going to get used to it.

 

* * *

 

“So did you really invent stunderwear?”

“I’m sorry, what?” Kaden asked, before he became aware that he was dreaming and the question hadn’t been directed at him. Noting Ratchet hunched over a starchart and the markazian girl standing awkwardly nearby, Kaden turned back to the window he’d been originally facing just long enough to centre himself before turning back to the conversation.

Ratchet hummed distractedly. “Yeah.”

“Wow.”

“What about it?”

“Nothing,” she said, then grimaced and shifted her weight. “I’m just… I guess I’m surprised you’re so open about it. It’s not exactly… something you buy at a vendor.”

Ratchet’s brow furrowed, before the implication obviously caught his interest and he looked up with a wry smile. “So you bought them retail?” His eyes drifted downward, and the girl shifted her weight again, giving him a pointed stare until his gaze snapped back to hers. His smirk only widened. “Huh.”

“It – you – I was curious, okay?” She somehow flailed without moving her arms and made a noise of pure frustration before continuing, “You do not get to kink-shame me, Ratchet – you _invented_ them!”

Kaden did a double-take at the ‘kink’, but Ratchet only grinned before lowering his eyes back to the chart.

“For what it’s worth, that wasn’t the _intended_ design. Not originally, anyway.”

“Yeah, right!”

“No, really,” he said. “The original patent has insulating material on the inside, so you _don’t_ get shocked by it, and the voltage is a lot higher. The intention was to reinforce defence when attackers literally have you ‘down to your shorts’. But the marketers got a hold of one of my proofs of concept, and the royalties are paying for my garage in Polaris, so I’m not complaining.”

Both Kaden and the girl stared at him blankly for several long seconds. Kaden’s mind was happily filling in the blanks about how such a device could be turned kinky, even as another part of him was wondering why Ratchet would even think to design such a weapon.

“Sex and violence are the true innovators of science,” Ratchet said lightly, before stabbing his finger at something on the map and pushing away from it. “I’m going to try this sector. If things don’t pan out, I’ll be back in a few hours.” He paused in the doorway, looking over his shoulder with a dirty glint to his smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll knock first.”

The girl snatched a pen off the table and threw it at him, but he was already gone. Kaden opened his eyes and furrowed his brow, staring at the ceiling as he thought through the logistics.

 

* * *

 

Once again, Kaden became aware of conversation happening around him before he realised he was staring blankly at the floor, and back in the dream world. He was in a bar, hunched over the back of a booth. The realisation made him groan; he was getting too old to be in situations like this.

“They really let you buy this? Do they not have age restrictions on Veldin?” an unfamiliar voice called over the crowd, and a closer voice laughed.

“Hey, if you don’t want me to buy your drinks, just say the word. I’m more than happy to down this whoooole thing by myself.”

“Give me that!”

Kaden surrendered to the inevitable and looked up. Ratchet was by his right shoulder, the little robot directly below him, and in the seat opposite was a fully-grown lombax woman. She had yellow fur with brown stripes, both colours only a few shades off Ratchet’s own, and a forward muzzle, but that was where the similarities between them ended. Kaden didn’t recognise the bottle she was holding, but as she poured two shots of it he could surmise the kind of hard liquor it held. A glance at Ratchet, discovering he was young again—still in his shirtless and shoeless phase—proved she was right. Not that Kaden had yet seen Ratchet at a proper drinking age, but it was still slightly disturbing to see how easily a child picked up a glass Kaden himself would balk at.

“Here’s to cuddly pets not trying to eat faces,” Ratchet toasted, and the woman met his glass with her own. The little robot had a can of oil that it extended up to meet them, and the three of them all nodded before knocking back the shots. Kaden was marginally mollified by the fact that Ratchet nearly hacked up a lung as he slammed the glass back on the table. “Oh, that was rougher than it should have been!”

“Cheap and hard, best way to drink,” the woman said cheerfully, pouring them both another shot. “It’s a lesson you learn in engineering school and never forget.”

“I’ll stick to mechanics and saving galaxies,” Ratchet croaked. “Ooh. Oh, yeah, gimme another one of those, I have to kill off the rest of the nerves in my throat.”

“I would advise you eat something first,” the little robot said. “I would not enjoy trying to carry either of you back to our hotel.”

“Two shots are not going to get us plastered,” Ratchet snapped, and the woman nodded as she pushed the full glass back to him before taking up her own.

“You know, Ratchet, I’d seen the stories about you—” she paused as he knocked back the second drink and had to cough it down. “—but I gotta admit I was surprised when you showed up.  Are you planning to make some kind of career out of this hero business?”

“Do not touch that bottle,” the robot ordered as Ratchet started reaching for it. “Not before you ask the waitress for something with both carbohydrates and protein.”

“Yes, _Mom_ ,” Ratchet droned, but obediently lifted his hand to flag down one of the waitress bots. He looked back at the woman while they waited. “I dunno. Being a hero seems to come with some risks I’m not so cool with. You turned out okay, but what if someone bad went after Clank?”

“I can handle myself, thank you,” the robot said primly.

“You know what I mean,” he said, but then the waitress arrived and they had to spend a few minutes ordering, since the robot kept shooting down their initial requests by insisting on healthier or more absorbent options. As she wheeled away again, Ratchet continued, “I don’t like the idea of people getting in trouble because of me.”

“So what do you do to get by?” the woman asked, pouring herself another drink even as the robot confiscated Ratchet’s glass. “I’m guessing the orphanage doesn’t let you out to save the galaxy and drink whiskey.”

“The orphanage? Just how young do you think I am?” he repeated with a laugh. “I’m a mechanic! It’s not the most well-paying job, but it’s been keeping me going for a few years now.”

“It would earn more if you simply did what your customers requested,” the robot reminded him. “If you would stop trying to add modifications and upgrades to even the simplest of jobs—”

“How is that a bad thing?” he demanded, waving his arms. “I’m improving them! Free of cost! I don’t even charge parts! People should be thanking me!”

The woman burst out laughing, reaching across the table to nudge his shoulder. “Thatta boy! Man, it’s been so long since I talked to another lombax, I almost forgot it’s not just me that thinks like that.”

“Wh-” Ratchet blinked, obviously and completely derailed. He stared at her for a few seconds, and then made a few attempts at sound that never got anywhere close to being words.

It was the robot to verbalise what had him so confused, “I am sorry. Did you just say you are a lombax? Like Ratchet?”

Both she and Kaden stared at them, wondering why that was even a question, until understanding slowly dawned on the woman’s face. She stared right back at Ratchet for a moment, then reached out and forcefully took the glass away from the robot to pour another shot. The way she shoved it at Ratchet brooked no argument, nor did the double-shot she gave herself. She lifted it with a very clearly forced smile. “Here’s to lombax ingenuity! May the rest of the universe get off its boring ass and appreciate our creativity and goodwill for what it is. While they still have it,” she added hoarsely.

Ratchet continued staring at her for a few more seconds, then shook himself and grabbed up the glass, obviously trying to cover his own shock with a cool veneer as he met her toast. “Hear, hear.”

Kaden rolled over, eyes blinking open against his will. He fell back to sleep almost immediately, but the interaction kept him from dreaming peacefully for the rest of the night.

 

* * *

 

_“Okay, my initial thoughts are that you’re right,” Joen said as she rewound the dreams back to the first of his recordings and watched Ratchet upgrade some kind of two-wheeled transport device with afterburners. “These are definitely not dreams. They don’t have the focus of actual dreams – there’s background, external actions, what have you. I agree, you’re definitely seeing into something real here.”_

_Kaden didn’t relax. He’d almost hoped he’d just made up the nightmare of Ratchet’s life._

_“My second impression is that if this isn’t another reality, you’re seeing forward in time. The technology in use clearly isn’t lombax, but it’s more advanced than you generally see outside our planet. But not too advanced. I’d need to do more analysis, but it’s definitely within the next century.”_

_“Any ideas of why I’m seeing this stuff?” he asked, and she shook her head._

_“Nothing immediately springs to mind. I’ll have to review them properly to identify the patterns of the dreams. Keep recording them though. We’ll figure it out, lieutenant.”_

 

* * *

 

The sky above was a soft, calming blue, a few clouds overhead, green trees obscuring the view only slightly. Kaden blinked twice, then lowered his gaze to find himself in a…

His breath caught.

It was a lombax city. He didn’t recognise it exactly, not enough to know the continent or name, but it had that unique lombax architecture. Cogs and gears, shining white towers and smooth blue glass windows.

And it looked like someone had taken to it with a nuclear blast.

He fell back a few steps, then gasped and swung around, searching for his boy, begging him not to be hurt. “Ratchet –!”

He wasn’t hurt. He was just standing in the doorway of an apartment building, his back to Kaden as he looked inside.

When he didn’t move, even after a full minute, Kaden looked around to find the little robot that was so rarely away from his boy. It was standing a few feet away from him, watching Ratchet with one of its peculiarly effective expressions.

“What happened here?” Kaden asked it, and it slowly turned its head to look at him.

“I do not think it is my place to tell you,” it said quietly. “I do not think it would be wise.”

“Wh- why –” He cut himself off, remembering his discussing with Joen. If this really was the future he was seeing, he knew enough about the time travel devices he guarded to know messing with the time stream was a bad idea. He frowned at Ratchet’s still unmoving figure. “What is he doing? What’s he waiting for?”

“I suspect… the courage to enter,” the robot said, “or perhaps the courage to turn away. I will wait for either, as long as it takes.”

“Was that his home once?” he asked. “Is this where he was born?”

“We do not know.”

Kaden looked down at it again, but the robot only gazed back at him silently, until Kaden had to blink, and found himself staring at his girlfriend’s back instead.

 

* * *

 

Soft purring roused Kaden from sleep, and for a moment he wondered what he’d done to make his girlfriend so happy. But then he recognised the slightly disjointed feeling, and blinked up at the ceiling as he tried to adjust to the dreamscape.

“Mm… that feels nice.”

Apparently jolted out of whatever moment was happening, the purring faltered. “Hm?”

“Nothing. I just like lying here with you like this.”

“Mm.”

Despite the sweetness, that made Kaden grit his teeth. Ratchet and the markazian, making pillow talk. Of all the moments to intrude on. And while she seemed to be a slightly more appropriate age than the cazar had been, he still didn’t get what Ratchet saw in her.

The purring returned again until Ratchet suddenly grunted. “Knock it off, you’re gonna put me to sleep.”

“So? I like your ears.”

“And they really like your hands, but I need to get up at some point today,” he mumbled. “Clank’s gonna give us _looks_ if we stay in bed all morning.”

“He’s gonna give us looks anyway. And like he can talk. Did you hear him last night, bragging to that bar-bot with the plasma reader?”

Ratchet chuckled lowly. “Always the ladies’ man.”

“He needs to start looking for a girl with a nice sisterboard, not just a fast RAM unit.”

“Actually, I think he’s more into cooling systems than RAM.”

“So shallow. How are the two of you such good friends?”

“Egh, he makes good waffles.”

She giggled, and they fell silent for a few minutes before she suddenly gasped and Ratchet grunted. “Hey, what –”

“I just remembered something I wanted to show you. I was going through Dad’s stuff last week, looking for stuff you might like,” she said, and Kaden felt her hit the floor. She hurried off a few steps and rummaged around in what sounded like a drawer before coming back.

“What is that? A sound-player?” Ratchet asked curiously. “Weird controls.”

“Yeah. But it works the same. See, this is the power, and this is the play button.”

Soon, the soft sounds of Mittens McKray’s latest ballad were tinkling out of the speakers. Kaden rolled his eyes – his girlfriend was obsessed with Mittens McKray, and he’d thought the one place he’d never have to hear her soppy singing was in one of these dreams.

“Real romantic, but uh… didn’t really pick this as your style, Tal,” Ratchet noted, and the markazian made a vague noise.

“Yeah, the lyrics are asinine, but do you hear anything else? Something like a piano, or a guitar?”

“Yeah, of course. It started like ten seconds before she started singing.”

“ _I can’t_.”

There was a pause, and Kaden looked up at the bunk despite himself. Ratchet seemed even more flummoxed than he was. “You can’t?”

“No. You can hear decibel ranges that I can’t. Those amazing ears of yours. The instruments playing on this song aren’t audible to most bipedal races in the Polaris galaxy. Only lombaxes,” she said, and then lowered her voice to something warm and excited. “This is lombax music, Ratchet.”

The pause stretched out even longer this time, until Kaden heard the shifting of two bodies moving against each other, and Ratchet cleared his throat.

“The lyrics are pretty horrible, aren’t they?” he murmured, and the markazian hummed.

“I still want to listen to them. Just a while longer.”

He hesitated before saying, “I-if you insist, Tal.”

Kaden woke up with the song in his head, and put on the album as soon as his girlfriend was up. They danced around his apartment as it played, and he reminded himself how lucky he was to hear it.

 

* * *

 

Kaden was barely aware of anything when the markazian girl walked past him, jolting him out of the vague state he’d been in. He blinked at the wall beyond her for a moment, then turned to watch her keep walking.

Ratchet was cleaning his weapons again, eyeing down the chamber of some kind of blaster with a slight grimace. “I’m gonna need a new extension swab. This thing gets way too thin for my current ones.”

The markazian ignored him, holding out a small device. “A communication came through for you.”

“A communication?” he repeated, lowering the blaster. “Aphelion didn’t mention –”

“No, it came via courier. It’s been doing rounds of three galaxies trying to find you,” she said blankly, waving it insistently. “And it’s locked. I can’t figure out how to play it.”

As Ratchet gave her a long and cautious look, Kaden moved over to examine what she was holding, hoping to give Joen something to work with. After a beat, he wasn’t surprised the markazian couldn’t open it – there was a genetic bioscan module covering the buttons. It was evidently coded for Ratchet, because he’d barely reached out to take the thing when it opened, and the lombax woman from a few dreams back appeared.

“Wh- that’s a lombax!” the girl breathed.

“Angela. We met about… seven, eight years ago?” Ratchet supplied, and then pressed the play button.

“ _Hi Ratchet, hi Clank. You’re probably wondering why I sent you snail mail, but the fact is, I don’t want this getting into the wrong hands,_ ” the recording said quickly. “ _I’m going to put a genetic bioscan on this. You probably won’t know what that is, but the long and the short of it is that no one but Ratchet will be able to open it. Sorry, Clank, but these kind of locks don’t work for robots._ ”

“It’s like the –” the markazian began, but Ratchet shushed her as the recording continued.

“ _I know we haven’t talked in a while, but I figured you deserved to know in case I… go missing. A real nasty piece of work is coming after me – or both of us, really. I think the only reason he didn’t before is because he mostly stuck to the Polaris galaxy, so he didn’t know we were around. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t decided to go back to Fastoon last year. I – oh, that’s our home world, you remember me telling you about it? I just… I needed to see it. I don’t know why, now, I mean, there was nothing there, but… It didn’t take long for him to find out about me._ ”

“Ah, dammit,” sighed Ratchet.

The recording shook its head, obviously cursing herself for an idiot. “ _Anyway, I’ve found this guy who thinks he can help me. He thinks he can find the lombax secret. If he does, and it works, I don’t know, we might be able to set things right. For both of us. Me and you, I mean, not me and him. You, Ratchet. Not Clank. Not that Clank couldn’t come, but… Sorry, my head’s a mess right now. Anyway, if you get contacted by a markazian by the name of Apogee, that’s him. You can trust him, I think._ ”

“Apogee – she’s talking about Dad!” the markazian girl cried, but Ratchet didn’t respond, still staring at the recording.

“ _But here’s the thing, Ratchet. I can just see you getting mixed up in this without knowing what’s going on, but this time the whole universe will be at stake,_ ” it continued. “ _So if someone asks you to help them find the lombax secret, and they aren’t this Apogee guy? Say no. Don’t get involved. Don’t help, don’t try and stop them, don’t do anything. Because we both know you’ll find it, because you always do, and we can’t risk it this time._ ”

Kaden looked down at his boy, wondering at the lack of expression on his face, and the way his ears had drooped. Something about this was hurting him.

“ _Anyway. I have to go, but… If we don’t meet again Ratchet, thank you. For everything. Not just me, but literally everything. No one says that to you enough. Keep him safe, Clank. And hopefully I’ll see you both on the other side. Angela out._ ”

The recording shut off, and for a moment, no one so much as breathed.

Slowly, Ratchet put the recording down on the table, and picked up his blaster again. The markazian girl looked at him carefully, her hands curled into fists near her waist. “Ratchet…? You okay?”

 He didn’t say anything, just looking at his stripped blaster for several long seconds. Then he picked up his oil and squirted it down the barrel.

“I better get back to this. We’ll catch up to IRIS pretty soon,” he said quietly.

“Ratchet –”

“It’s fine, Tal.”

She stared at him, but didn’t reach out the way Kaden almost wanted her to. In the end, she silently turned and walked away, leaving Kaden alone with Ratchet, who simply went back to his work, like nothing had ever happened.

 

* * *

 

_Another night, another battle, one lombax child against an army… and the child won. Kaden gulped down air, hating the taste of everything, as he blindly reached up to flush the waste. On one hand, he was honestly amazed he was still affected so badly. On the other, he was glad that even after so many nights of this, he wasn’t immune to the horror._

_No one should have been able to ignore it._

_And yet it seemed whole galaxies were willing to. Whole galaxies of people letting—no, encouraging—a child…_

_“How long is this going to go on for, Kaden?”_

_He fell back against the wall and turned his head toward the bathroom door. His girlfriend was standing there, watching him. He closed his eyes and tried to find some way to play it off._

_“It’s been months,” she reminded him. “Every time I stay over here, you wake up from some dream that hurts you. Alister told me you chased them to the_ Solana galaxy _last month. That you’re seeing some dimensional physicist. You could at least tell me about them.”_

_“I’m not really supposed to talk about work,” he croaked through a wry smile. “You know how it is.”_

_“Don’t be cute; this isn’t work,” she snapped._

_He just looked at her, unable to bring himself to explain. She glared at him for a few more moments, then stalked over to the sink, where she filled a glass with water to give him. He took it silently, and didn’t say anything as she sank down to sit beside him._

_Ten years they’d been together now. Since high school, when she’d been the beauty queen and he’d been the school holoball star. She’d put up with him while he took the sport professional, and when that elbow injury knocked him out of it. She’d been there when he joined the Avoidables. Put up with years of secrecy and study, always saying that she didn’t really want to talk about work anyway. One of these days, he was going to ask her to marry him, and she’d almost definitely say yes. Then, maybe… then maybe they’d have a family._

_But when he thought like that, he got so scared of the world in his dreams. Ratchet’s world, where a child was all but alone in the universe and massacring armies single-handed. He hoped… he prayed that it was the far, far future. Too far for his future wife to see, too far for any child he might have to deal with._

_And yet… as much as he was terrified that he could live to see Ratchet’s world… he was even more terrified that he would never meet his boy. Never look him in the eye, shake him by the shoulders, tell him that…_

_Tell him…_

_His girlfriend’s arms slipped around his shoulders, and Kaden leaned into her, clenching his teeth against some emotion he didn’t understand._

 

* * *

 

Gazing up past a hangar door, Kaden stared at a purple sky and listened to the sound of Ratchet grumbling behind him. He didn’t immediately turn, just taking the moment to listen.

He was younger than usual, Kaden could recognise that from his voice now. Young enough to still be on Veldin, probably in the tiny garage he’d scrimped, saved, and slaved for. The realities of which were apparently shocking to the little robot.

“But I have this information in my databanks. Organics such as yourselves require living quarters.”

“First of all, it’s called a house, not ‘living quarters’. This isn’t a ship. And secondly, this garage _is_ my house,” Ratchet said irritably. “See the armchair? The fridge over there?”

“But where do you sleep?”

“My chair reclines, and why do you care?” he demanded. “ _You_ don’t need a bed.”

That made Kaden turn, though not because of the lack of furniture. Even his own friends, who had grown up as a lombax should, cared for by parents who loved them and taught them basic sense, had done stupid things like not bothering to buy a bed when they got their own home. It was Ratchet’s tone. Aside from when the little robot had stopped him drinking, Kaden had never heard Ratchet sound so annoyed with his companion.

But it didn’t seem fazed, still staring around the garage with an excellent mimic of concern. “A chair—no matter how comfortable—is no fit place for extended sleep! The organic body requires –”

“Yeah, you know, I don’t need a robot telling me what I require, okay?” Ratchet snapped, holding out a hand as if to stop him. “You might’ve been right about Qwark and Drek, but you don’t get to tell me how to live.”

The robot levelled him with a slightly-narrow eyed stare, but fell silent.

“Besides,” Ratchet continued, a sideways smile edging onto his lips despite the hard glint in his eyes, “we’ve got way more important things to buy first. I ain’t sharing my chair – if you’re gonna live here from now on, we’re gonna have to get you your own. Hey, you think we can get the President to buy one for us? Oh! And a TV! Saving the galaxy’s gotta be worth a surround sound holo immersion game unit right?”

The robot just sighed wearily, and Kaden woke up just enough to pity the poor galactic council that had to put up with a fifteen year old lombax saving their galaxy.

 

* * *

 

“As my manager says: ‘ta-dah’!”

Jolted into the dream, Kaden looked up with a start to find himself in a plush living room with an unstocked bar along one wall and a huge lounge suite facing the other. He himself was half-hidden behind a massive pot-plant with huge green leaves, and since he couldn’t see a way around it, he had to duck down to see past it.

The little robot—Clank, he was realising it was called—was leading a very apprehensive-looking Ratchet into the middle of the room. “Well? What do you think?”

“I…” Ratchet scratched at his cheek, slowly turning the better to see everything. “I don’t – I don’t know, Clank, I mean…”

“I thought we could repurpose the bar into a workspace for you,” Clank said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Those shelving units will hold your tools quite well, I think. I also have several  leads on potential garages for your larger projects, but did not want to buy any until you had seen them for yourself.”

“Clank –”

“I do not want to hear it, Ratchet. We moved to this galaxy for my career, it is my responsibility to ensure we are well set up.”

Ratchet clenched his teeth to bite back on whatever argument the little robot didn’t want to have. But he didn’t look happy.

Kaden looked around in interest – this wasn’t a place he had seen before, but most of the times he had seen Ratchet around this age was when he was with the cazar woman. This… high-rise apartment, Kaden was guessing, was larger than any of the garages or living rooms he had seen so far. More ostentatiously luxurious, too.

“The bedrooms and bathrooms are through that door,” Clank continued, “I thought you should have the master bedroom, due to the size. However, this apartment does not have facilities for oil baths, so we will have to renovate – I did not think you would mind. Which reminds me, there is also a rather well-designed kitchen. It has a _stove_.”

Kaden raised an amused eyebrow at the pointed remark, but Ratchet just pinched the bridge of his muzzle and said nothing.

“I believe I will enjoy cooking; I have already downloaded several hundred recipes to my hard drive.”

“You don’t eat,” Ratchet ground out.

“And soon, I will not be able to say the same of you,” the little robot said triumphantly, and then gave an evil little giggle.

“ _Clank_.” Ratchet took a mildly unsteady breath and hissed it out through his teeth. “I am not a _pet_.”

“No, you are my friend,” it replied, abruptly matching Ratchet’s furious tone with something even colder. “Who took me in when I had nothing, helped me when I had no one, and asked nothing of me except to start his ship. Who ensured I was taken care of when I chose to be self indulgent. Who supported me when I was scouted by that director, who took me to each shoot and screening and was there for me when I needed a friend. And now, when I finally have means to repay just a small sliver of what you have done for me, I will not allow your pride to stop me.”

For several long seconds, they just stared at each other silently. Being a robot, it wasn’t entirely surprising when Clank won, Ratchet looking away and shuffling in place for a second before gesturing aimlessly for the hallway. “So you gonna show me the rest of this place or what?”

Kaden leaned back against the wall only to fall out of the dream, and blinked at his alarm clock. He didn’t really understand what he’d just seen, but for some reason it depressed him all the same.

 

* * *

 

The floor was some kind of polished cement, with glass spread throughout to give it a sparkling, attractive finish. Kaden blinked at it rapidly until he realised it was a dream and looked up. It was another apartment, smaller than the last and not nearly as plush, with no furniture, but the view outside the window was phenomenal, looking out over a wide skyline filled with spiralling buildings and hover-cars. It would look beautiful at night.

Ratchet, back to his normal age, was standing nearby and also staring at the floor with an appraising tilt to his head. Eventually, he looked up from under his eyebrows to where Clank was inspecting the bare metal walls, and when the little robot looked around, they spent a quiet second in silent conversation before turning to an unfamiliar markazian woman in a pinstriped suit.

“Give us a minute?” Ratchet asked, and she hesitated, then smiled with too many teeth.

“Of course! I’ll be in the kitchen!” and then she scuttled out. Clank looked to Ratchet expectantly, and both he and Kaden listened to the woman linger outside the door for a minute before sighing and continuing on, muttering about ‘secretive cat freaks’.

“I like her,” Ratchet said with a grin, even as Kaden snarled at the insult. “But I like this place more. Easy upkeep, nice workspace below… and Luminopolis is beautiful. But I still don’t get why you want to move here.”

“The Bogonian Galaxy does not hold the lustre it once did,” Clank said vaguely.

“Yeah… It would be nice to get away from the Dreadzone fans,” he agreed, moving closer to the window. “But I dunno, Clank… Polaris? If you want a different galaxy, why don’t we just go back to Solana? We have a perfectly good home on Veldin. I’ll even let you build that living space you wanted.”

“Solana still remembers Chairman Drek and Captain Qwark. I would rather we live somewhere that we are not known. At least for a while,” he said. “And besides, there is something about Polaris that I find… comforting. A rightness to it.”

“You sure you don’t just like being close to the centre of the universe?” Ratchet asked, smirking at him over his shoulder. “Since you already think that’s what you are.”

He ignored that. “I like it here. And I like this apartment. _If_ it is within our budget.”

“It is, if I go ahead with the X-Ite offer on that altered patent,” he said, almost to himself, as he went back to the view. He continued watching the cars for a moment, then turned to look at Clank directly. “You really want to do this? Leave Bogon, give up acting, all that? Secret Agent Clank has been good to you. You sure you wanna give that up?”

As they gazed at each other, Kaden got the distinct feeling Ratchet was either not mentioning or not aware of the real reason Clank wanted to move. He wondered what it was. Did Clank know this was where the lombaxes lived? Or was there something else that Kaden hadn’t picked up on? Whatever it was, Clank didn’t specify, just kept his gaze steady and nodded. “I am sure.”

Ratchet hesitated a few more moments, then shrugged and pulled a small device out of his back pocket to toss over to Clank. “Okay, pal; if you’re sure. Send my agent a message, giving him the go-ahead on stunderwear. I’ll go talk to our real estate friend and get us a good price.”

“How will you do that?” he asked curiously. “Polaris has a higher inflation than Solana, remember.”

“Yeah, but for all she knows, the integrity of the wiring in this place is lousy, the air pollution totally screws with my highly sensitive lombax sinuses, and I actually did hear her call me a ‘cat freak’,” he said cheerfully. “I’m absolutely going to play that one for all it’s worth.”

“I would complain about your moral integrity if I believed you had some,” Clank said dryly, already typing into the device. “I, on the other hand, would rather not buy anything from someone who speaks of you in such a way. Not unless they remove fifty thousand bolts from the asking price.”

Ratchet snorted, and Kaden made to follow him out of the room, but had barely taken a step before he abruptly woke up.

 

* * *

 

_“Lombax secret,” Toen repeated slowly, tail swishing behind him as his eyes swept over the storehouse. “You’re sure that’s what they mentioned.”_

_Joen silently held up the recording and hit play. “_ Anyway, I’ve found this guy who thinks he can help me. He thinks he can find the lombax secret. If he does, and it works, I don’t know, we might be able to set things right. _”_ _She hit the pause button, looking at him expectantly, and he pursed his lips._

_“You know, the point of a secret is that you don’t tell people about it,” he said. “That’s why we called it ‘the lombax secret’.”_

_Kaden tried not to snap. He really did. He took a deep breath and counted to ten before asking, “Which secret is she likely to be talking about? We have several.”_

_“Yes, but she specified ‘the’. Implying ‘the big one’. The Dimensionator,” Toen said bluntly. “What we did to the cragmites.”_

_“That can’t be right,” argued Joen. “No one’s touched the Dimensionator since it was used to seal the cragmites away, and Kaden is clearly dreaming of the future. There is no reason for her to be talking about technology we ourselves don’t use.”_

_“There is one reason,” Kaden said quietly. “Tachyon.”_

_They both sighed irritably. “Don’t start, Kaden.”_

_Apparently today was about testing his patience. He understood that the entire Avoidables Force believed he disliked Tachyon because of his species, and not because he was a scum-sucking, egotistical, scheming little bottom-feeder, but if there was ever a time to judge someone on what they literally were, it was now._

_“He is a cragmite. If anyone could use the Dimensionator, it would be him.”_

_“He doesn’t even know what happened to the cragmites,” Joen snapped. “Commander Furlowe’s entire position is devoted to ensuring he doesn’t find out about that or the Dimensionator itself.”_

_“You’re too young to be stupidly prejudiced, Kaden,” Toen added, and Kaden scoffed._

_“She must be talking about something else. Something big enough to become a new secret,” Joen continued pointedly. “Any ideas what that could be?”_

_Turning his back on Kaden’s scowl, Toen shrugged and took a few steps into the storehouse, as if it would help him think. “I’ll take it to the team; see what we can come up with.”_

 

* * *

 

The sun was setting, almost gone from the horizon. He was in the middle of a large desert, but on what seemed to be a constructed path – edged on one side by a cliff, and boulders on the other. Crates were stacked in groups of three or four every few cubits, marking the path as fairly well traversed, but there was no one around.

No one but a very small Ratchet. Even knowing what he did about the boy, Kaden couldn’t believe anyone would have let him be out here without adult supervision at his age – not at this time of night. He couldn’t have been more than eight, and he looked terrified. He had no wrench, no weapon, nothing. He was creeping along, eyes darting in all directions with his ears at their full height, obviously listening for anything.

And for good reason. While there were no people, there were… creatures. Little eight-legged scorpions, scuttling from rock to rock and watching him. Whenever he ventured too close, they would rear up, stinger-tipped tails arching up over their backs in threat until he would hurry away.

But eventually, he didn’t get the option. As they entered a wider area, they were confronted by the largest one yet. Coming up to Kaden’s chest and therefore much larger than the currently tiny Ratchet, poison dripped from its stinger, and it clicked pincers the size of Ratchet’s head in clear intention.

This was the queen, and Ratchet was going to feed her hive.

There were no quips. No cocky grin. Ratchet backed up, just staring at the creature until he tripped over a rock and only barely caught himself on his knees. Still, the scorpion kept coming, and he seemed frozen, helpless.

It was such an odd sensation. Kaden _knew_ Ratchet survived this. He’d seen him older. But Ratchet was too young to do anything here. Too young, too alone, too scared.

But as Kaden watched, Ratchet’s breathing got faster, and he suddenly lunged forward to grab the rock he’d just tripped over. He scrambled back to his feet, backing up until his back hit a boulder. His fingers tightened around his makeshift weapon.

For all the death Kaden had seen in his lifetime, this one made him close his eyes, mourning something he hadn’t realised was already lost.

 

* * *

 

He was in a tiled box.

That was the first coherent thought to come to Kaden’s mind, a second later realising he was in a bathroom, standing in a shower which was in pretty dire need of a thorough cleaning. He grimaced and stepped out of it, to where Ratchet was standing in front of a mirror. Embarrassingly, he’d apparently caught Ratchet as he was getting ready to bathe, but luckily before he’d stripped completely. He was down to his underwear, inspecting his claws with a vaguely annoyed look on his face.

He was young, probably around eighteen. Skinnier than the last time Kaden had taken a good look at him at this age, and he didn’t seem to have been taking care of his fur recently. It was dull and brittle, with grease and dried blood tangled through it, tufts sticking up or even torn out. He was holding his tail very oddly, too – it was almost flat against him, running down his leg in a way that Kaden didn’t think he could mimic without pain and someone actually holding it down. He almost wondered if it was broken at the base, to be able to lie flat like that.

A minute passed in silent stillness. Ratchet was barely moving, and it took Kaden a surprisingly long time to notice he wasn’t actually looking at his claws anymore, but rather his reflection in the mirror. He just hadn’t otherwise shifted.

Kaden shifted his weight, watching warily. Similar to that time in the arena, something about this moment felt wrong.

Thankfully, it was interrupted by a quiet knock at the door. “Ratchet?”

He didn’t immediately move, just blinked. Another second and it was like the moment broke entirely. He even coughed and rolled his shoulders to further dispel the tension before answering. “Yeah, pal?”

The little robot paused before responding. “Are you…” He stopped, then obviously began with a different tack. “Dinner will be arriving soon. Will you be ready for it?”

Even Kaden could tell it was a time limit more than a question – if Ratchet wasn’t out of the bathroom by then, Clank was going to start demanding answers.

Ratchet shifted to brace himself against the sink, sighing out an inaudible breath. His ears fell in the movement, and when he looked back up again, he no longer seemed dangerous – just very, very tired. “Yeah, pal. I’ll be ready.”

Kaden didn’t believe him, but he was awake before he could figure out why.

 

* * *

 

He was staring at Fastoon.

He blinked rapidly, feeling oddly off-balance, because he knew he’d fallen asleep in his bed, in his apartment, somewhere down on that planet. But here he was now, staring at it all from a starship.

“Hey there, cadet! Where’s your little buddy?”

Kaden turned, even more confused until he found Ratchet kneeling in front of a wiring duct behind him, the hulking green creature he’d seen a few times before striding over with a mug of something steaming.

“Interfacing with the control schema in the armoury,” Ratchet said absently. “We might’ve made everything operational again before we faced Zurgo, but that doesn’t mean we’re completely back to snuff.”

“Ha! Crazy he might have been, but that kid sure knew how to spin a villainous plot, am I right?” he said cheerfully, and then sat down beside the duct, leaning back like he was in a lounge chair rather than on a cold, hard floor. “You know, he kind of reminded me a little of you.”

Ratchet raised a silent eyebrow, and the hulk slanted a grin at him.

“Time was, you went a little off the deep end and tried to kill me yourself.”

He twitched, then sighed and went back to the air duct. “Yeah, well. You… tried to make up for what you did.”

“Ha! Oh, don’t you worry, cadet, you’ve more than redeemed yourself! Helping to save two galaxies, helping me out before Clank went missing, and with that whole clock thing – you’ve done okay for yourself.”

Ratchet took a deep breath and didn’t respond to the hulk misunderstanding his words.

 “But it got me thinking about history, you know? How we all got started on these crazy, whirlwind adventures of ours. Do you know the story of how I became a hero?”

“I know the story you used to spin on the radio, about saving that orphanage from invading nuns,” Ratchet said dryly, only to pull back out of the duct to look at him. “Seriously, Qwark, was any of that story true?”

The hulk just looked at him for a few moments, before he visibly deflated, lowering his eyes to his drink. He shrugged one shoulder. “It maybe wasn’t quite as… epic as the radio plays made it sound. Some tyhrranoids were clearing the jungle where I was living with the monkeys. They hurt some of my friends, so I stole one of their guns and hurt them back.”

Ratchet smiled slightly. “You kill ’em?”

“A couple. Mostly just knocked out a bunch of nanotech. I wasn’t the crack shot I am today.”

“Ha!” He leaned back on his hands, smirking at nothing. “The first time I shot a guy, it was a headshot.”

“No way!”

“Yep. I was aiming for his chest!” he confessed, laughing the awkward laugh of a joke that wasn’t funny but needed to be made. “I was shaking so bad, and it was like… oh, man, that gun had to have been two-thirds the size of me. I was only like… twelve? Nah, younger than that, when was it…?”

The hulk grinned the same way some of Kaden’s Avoidable buddies did when they were exchanging horror stories of the crazed physicists they sometimes got assigned to. “What had a kid like you killing bad guys that young?”

“Oh… I don’t…” Ratchet shook his head, closing his eyes in memory until it apparently came to him. “That’s it. He was this crazy bounty hunter, working for some nutcase woman that wanted a lombax-fur wrap.”

Kaden stared, but the hulk just rolled his eyes like it wasn’t the least bit surprising. “The Solana galaxy, huh?”

“Egh, it has its problems, but it’s not like Polaris is perfect,” he said slowly. “Sure, it’s kill or be killed a lot of the time, but at least you always know where you stand with people.”

“True that,” the hulk agreed, and took a sip of his drink. “Well. Except when they trick the whole galaxy into thinking they’re heroes while secretly helping an evil real estate mogul destroy worlds.”

“Well, yeah,” he said, playing into a joke Kaden didn’t understand.

They were quiet for so long that Kaden turned away, back to Fastoon.

 

* * *

 

_When nothing particularly exciting was going on, the life of an Avoidable was all about research. Reading and understanding the theories of the physicists, the concepts behind designs, the best ways to disable things that could tear the fabric of space-time apart…_

_It wasn’t Kaden’s favourite part of the job._

_With the depressing turn his dreams of Ratchet had taken recently, he found himself unable to settle to the work. Instead, he often found himself wandering the storehouse—patrolling, he told Toen—and just… looking. Wondering. What if one of these devices could help him? One of these things could take him to Ratchet._

_Maybe he could find him before it all went wrong. Before that scorpion backed him into a corner. Before those stupid kids could bully him. Before his parents could abandon him on some backwater planet in some zoni-forsaken galaxy._

_Maybe he could save him._

_Joen never seemed that concerned about Ratchet. She was more focussed on the world around him – she had even handwaved his existence as unimportant, stating he probably wasn’t really a lombax, so much as it was just Kaden’s subconscious influencing the dreams to give him a focal point._

_She was convinced he was seeing the dreams in order to prevent some kind of catastrophe related to the lombax secret._

_He stared at the dimensionator, hidden in its crate behind the unbreakable glass._

_He wondered if it could take him to Ratchet._

 

* * *

 

He’d been staring at a door when it suddenly opened, alerting him to the dream around him. The cazar girl walked in, and he looked around in search of his boy.

Ratchet was hunched over a drink at a table behind him, dressed as Kaden had never seen him before – a sloppy, comfortable looking sweatshirt several sizes too large that had been folded back to show his bare hands. He barely looked up from under his eyebrows as the girl walked toward him. “Hey, Sasha. I didn’t know you were coming.”

“Of course I came,” she said quietly. “Clank let me in, and I saw Al. I can’t believe what they did to him, I’m so sorry.”

“He was the one hurt, not me,” he said. “I was the one who let it happen.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Ratchet. It wasn’t your fault.”

He huffed but didn’t otherwise respond to that, sitting back in his chair as she sat down in the one opposite. “Sorry about the Pheonix. To be honest, I don’t know what happened to it.”

“I don’t care about the ship, Ratchet,” she murmured. “I saw some of the broadcasts. I got so mad for you. The things they made you do, and the stuff those commentators said –”

“It was smack talk; whatever,” he said shortly, and her lips pursed.

 For a few minutes, neither spoke. Kaden found himself feeling oddly on edge, watching Ratchet like he expected the kid to…

Sweet eye of a zoni, what was it about Ratchet at this age that made Kaden so anxious? It was like the arena, and that time in the bathroom. Something about his boy just felt _wrong_. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but something about these moments felt brittle. Like if nothing changed, something could go very wrong, very fast.

“I know you don’t want to talk to me,” the girl said, before he could figure it out, “but you should talk to somebody. Somebody organic. Clank won’t understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand,” Ratchet replied. “I was on Dreadzone, I was a gladiator, just like I always wanted to be. I rescued us, killed the bad guy, saved the day, and had some fun doing it. That’s all there is to it.”

She shook her head. “You are not what those people tried to make you, Ratchet.”

He opened his mouth, but cut himself off before he could speak, and just looked at her instead. After a moment, she reached over the table to grip his wrist, her gaze flicking between his eyes in search of something Kaden had a feeling wasn’t there.

“You’re not. You’re a good person in extremely lousy circumstances,” she said firmly. “Please don’t let this take that away from you.”

Ratchet’s eyes dropped away from her, and he pulled his arm out of her reach. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Ratchet –”

“It was a high stakes game show,” he snapped. “And I won. I won it all. I beat the droves of armies, I destroyed the citadels, _I killed the heroes_. And it didn’t feel any different than anything I’ve done before.”

Ah.

Kaden folded his arms as things clicked into place.

Being a soldier, killing people with long-range guns and grenades was… surprisingly easy. You didn’t have to think about it. They weren’t usually lombaxes, or worthy of note. They were just the bad guys and you were just doing your job. It was easy… until the first time you had to kill someone up close. The first time you had to acknowledge that you had murdered someone.

The first time Kaden had watched the life bleed from the eyes of another lombax, he’d tried to convince himself it didn’t bother him. That it wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before. But that put all of those earlier deaths in a new light. He’d wondered what kind of person he was to have not cared about the people he’d killed before. What kind of person could kill at all.

He remembered thinking he had to be some kind of monster.

Ratchet stayed where he was for another few seconds, then abruptly shoved himself out of his chair and started for the door. “Thanks for coming by.”

“Ratchet –” was all the cazar managed to say before he left, and the dream went dark.

 

* * *

 

The room was dark around him, lit only by a soft glow outside the window. Kaden moved over to it, fingers brushing the glass as he gazed out at an asteroid belt.

It was rare to wake up in one of these dreams and not find Ratchet nearby. So he wasn’t too surprised when the door opened behind him only a moment later, and the boy himself walked in.

He was holding a praetorian omniwrench. It was much, much older, but it almost looked like the one Alister had and prized more than some parents did their children. Ratchet carefully set it against the wall, and then stepped back, just looking at it for a moment.

Slowly, and without any apparently conscious thought, Ratchet’s hand moved to a pocket on the back of his armour. It was hard to see in the dim light, but Kaden thought he might be shaking slightly.

He pulled out a pocket watch.

It was a strange thing for him to be carrying in his armour, but that’s what it was. A holowatch – lombax make, no less. For a moment, it seemed like he was going to open it and check the time, but his fist clenched around it instead, his shoulders hunching.

His knees didn’t exactly give out, but it was almost like Ratchet just lost the will to keep standing. He hit his knees hard, then slumped over them, clutching the watch to his stomach.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Kaden knew there was nothing he could do, even as he knelt down beside him and let his hand hover over his boy’s shoulder. But as far as Ratchet knew, he was alone, and began rocking slightly back and forth, hissing increasingly broken apologies to no one.

And all Kaden could do was watch, a silent guard.

 

* * *

 

It was the same asteroid belt as the previous dream, but when Kaden looked around this time, it was to find Ratchet, Clank, and the markazian girl close by, with two ancient-looking warbots. Judging by the huge schematics he was holding, Clank was apparently supervising, while the warbots argued over a huge piece of thick metal and the girl assisted Ratchet in whatever he was doing through a hatch in the floor. The whole room was covered in scorch marks and explosion damage.

“Are you sure about this, Ratchet?” the girl asked quietly. Kaden noticed her tail was curling around Ratchet’s ankle, though neither of them were acknowledging it. “It hasn’t been that long.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “I’ll leave the galactic hero work to you and the guys, but Polaris is a good place. I like it here.”

“I just… I want to be sure you’re okay. This galaxy hasn’t exactly been kind to you.”

“Not to… whine or anything, but… I could say that about every galaxy,” he said, and glanced up to give her a long, soft look. “And there are things here that I can’t have on Veldin.”

They just stared at each other for a moment, before he went back to work and she fiddled with a socket wrench. “So… are you selling that apartment on Igliak?” she asked, and then coughed. “I mean, you’ve still got your own room here, if – I mean – I’m not saying –”

“No,” he said, cutting off her babbling with an awkward look. “I… thanks, but… once this place is back up to scratch, I think it’d be better if we went back to our own place. For a while.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. And it’d be good if someone kept a closer eye on Qwark after all this,” she agreed, and Kaden winced. Her tail even started to pull away, and Ratchet didn’t stop it, though his expression said he clearly wanted to.

The awkward silence stretched between them, somehow made worse by the three roots that were blissfully unaware of it and snarking at each other in the background. But then Ratchet suddenly sighed out a hard breath and shoved himself back from the hatch, hands braced on his thighs.

“You have put up with enough of my crap, Talwyn. That’s all. I’m sick of you having to deal with my issues.”

She blinked, then tried a shameful smile. “I guess I haven’t exactly dealt with them very well, either.”

“No, don’t even –” He shook his head. “You’ve been great. Better than anything I could’ve ever asked for, it’s just…” He paused, licking his lips, and didn’t look at her. “Before Clank, I never had anyone. I’m not… I’m not good with taking help. So I don’t make it easy.”

“That’s not your fault,” she said softly.

“And it’s not the point, either,” he said. “Right now… it’s not just the General. It’s not just the whole lombax thing. I… I don’t know, I’m just… sure, I’ve saved a lot of people, but I’ve killed a lot of people too. I’ve gotten a lot of people hurt. The other week, when I thought you were…” He stopped again, closing his eyes. “It was my fault. And the idea that I could hurt you… I’m just tired of that, Tal. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

For a long moment, the girl—Talwyn—just stared at him. Then, she put down the wrench and shifted over to crouch beside him, her legs bent at awkward angles so that she could press as close against him  as possible, her arms and tail wrapped around him, cheek pressed to the top of his head. Kaden had to turn away, suddenly ashamed to have been watching so intently. The last thing he heard, as the dream faded, was her whisper, “Then stop breaking my heart.”

 

* * *

 

_Igliak was a nice planet, mostly known as a holiday destination for public servants because it was both pretty and far enough from the centre of the galaxy to be damn cheap. In a standard ship, it took a whole week to get there from anywhere people actually lived._

_Luminopolis was a small city, barely bigger than a town. They were still building most of the platforms that would make up the foundations for the towers. But he supposed that if you gave it fifty years, it could possibly become home to that expensive but comfortable apartment he’d seen Ratchet and Clank buy._

_Right now, there wasn’t much to see though, so he quickly got back in his ship and pulled up the nav-unit, searching for an asteroid belt. There were a few around, but nothing with a space station. So he searched for other things. There were a thousand Talwyns in the galaxy, and most of them were markazian. It took him a while to remember her surname – Apogee. There were no Talwyn Apogees. The only family of note was some big academic family that specialised in recent history and cultural studies. There was even a news article announced their son Max had recently begun studying at some big-shot university._

_There was nothing out here. He hadn’t really expected to find something, but…_

_It was all he had. The only way he was going to find his boy was by following the dreams._

_And after everything he'd seen lately, he was_ going _to find Ratchet._

 


	3. Chapter 3

It took a few seconds before Kaden realised he was the right way up. Ratchet was the one standing sideways.

How he was doing that without any apparent effort was beyond Kaden. He didn’t even seem to be aware he was at a right angle to the rest of the world, silently working on a fuse box in the ceiling. Clank was on his back, watching the floor below.

“We have incoming,” he said quietly, and Ratchet turned his head slightly.

“Incoming as in I need to move, or incoming as in I might have trouble getting down?”

“They do not appear to be looking up.”

“Do they look like _they’re_ going to move, or will I be shooting fish in a barrel in a minute?”

Raising an eyebrow at the smug tone, Kaden leaned over from his perch. Several stories below, a group of yellowish-green aliens in armour were pouring out of a doorway, obviously looking for a fight. But as Clank had said, they weren’t looking up, and Kaden began to realise he knew why. They were in what was basically a maintenance shaft – there was no way up, except for the magna-locked pathway Ratchet was currently standing on, and most people didn’t know how to use those.

Magna-boots were the stock-in-trade of the lowest of low-level technicians and mechanics – the ones who were sent after more valuable repair bots and into areas too dangerous to risk higher level personnel. From talking to Toen, Kaden had learned that most technicians ceremonially burned them as soon as they were promoted out of having to use them.

But Ratchet, he realised, had a pair strapped to his heels. And… in hindsight, he’d been wearing them in every battle Kaden had ever seen him take part in.

Probably because of moments like these, when he had to get somewhere out of the way.

Kaden sat back on his perch, dumbfounded in the way you only could be when someone pointed out the extremely obvious. How many times had he needed to get somewhere on a mission and never once looked at the maintenance shafts? The heroes in holo-vids always used ventilation shafts; how had he never once thought of magna-boots? He was a lombax! They looked at wrenches and cogs and made them into weapons! The whole universe thought of them as heroic engineers! This should have been in basic training!

“Okay, that’s the refuelling system adjusted,” Ratchet muttered, and then turned around, unholstering one of his impossibly huge guns. “Ten bolts say they don’t spot me even after I shoot the first guy.”

“We share a bank account, Ratchet,” Clank reminded him blandly, and he chuckled softly before opening fire.

He would have won, it turned out.

 

* * *

 

Those were some banged up looking hoverboots.

Kaden blinked, shaking himself out of the vague state he’d found himself in to realise he was watching Ratchet strap on an old pair of what looked very much like the hoverboots Kaden and Alister had drooled over in the sports’ store last month. In his time, they were top of the line, the kind of boot he could have justified only when he was still a professional holoball player. As it was, he would probably have to wait a year or so for the price to go down before he would be able to afford them.

 Ratchet’s pair was worn and scuffed, aged like most of the lombax tools Kaden had seen him with. They were a little too big for him, but he just tightened the straps until they bent the already damaged material and held tight.

“I am certain that you could reverse engineer a new pair if you attempted it. A pair that _fit_ ,” Clank noted, looking unimpressed from where he sat on a rock nearby. “Big Al would almost definitely help you, if you are not confident.”

“These are fine,” Ratchet said, and kicked them into gear. He continually rocked his weight from one foot to the other, hinting that he had never learned to ’boot properly. Kaden could hold himself stiff and perfectly still on his hoverboots, barely aware of the shifting thrust. “You coming?”

“I would rather keep time from here,” Clank replied, and Ratchet nodded.

“On my mark. Three, two, one, _mark_!”

And then he took off, and Kaden blinked again. From his balance, he hadn’t expected Ratchet to be that experienced, but as the kid launched himself off ramps and around tight corners, Kaden realised he was actually pretty good. Easily on par with Alister, at least.

“I have been told that hoverbooting was something of a common lombax past time,” Clank noted, and Kaden glanced at him.

“In certain circles. I’ve been booting since I was a kid. How long’s he been at it?”

“A few months. He is determined to master them, though I suspect these time trials he insists on are less training and more play,” he said, and Kaden grinned at a particularly well-timed whoop from his boy.

He settled back on his hips with a fond smile. “It’s good to see he’s got a hobby. If there was ever anyone who deserved some fun, it’s that kid.”

“I agree; however, while he may find it enjoyable, I do not think Ratchet considers this a ‘hobby’. When not training, he does not usually wear them unless he expects to enter battle.”

“What?” he asked, jerking around to stare at him. “How the hell would you use a pair of hoverboots in battle?”

Clank tilted his head as if surprised by the question, and then shifted in that peculiar way he had to give the impression of a smile. “I believe it is called ‘lombax ingenuity’.”

Kaden woke up from the sound of Clank’s evil little giggle.

 

* * *

 

It was less than a week later that Kaden discovered you used hoverboots in battle the same way Ratchet used most of his battle tools: with extreme prejudice.

He’d barely become aware of the dream when he had to duck blaster fire, and was only given a split second to see he was surrounded by very large robotic guards shooting very large laser weapons at his boy, who was tumbling through the air.

Then there was a click, and something that sounded very much like a controlled explosion, before Ratchet actually flew fists-first into the middle of one of the bots. Kaden wasn’t even able to track it as they slammed through the wall, and apparently a few more beyond.

He hesitated as the other robots stopped firing, just as confused as he was, and they all leaned over to peer through the newly formed hole in the wall.

There were five more holes just like it, and on the far side, Ratchet was just visible stumbling to his feet.

“He supercharged the thrusters,” Kaden said as he jerked upright, already scrambling out of bed to look for his own boots to start tinkering. “You’d just need to keep yourself steady and you become your own battering ram. If I’d had that against that invincible armour last month I would’ve finished that fight in minutes…!”

 

* * *

 

_“Alright you mewling brats, get back in and clean up. You’ve all got duty tomorrow. Not you, Kaden! Front and centre!”_

_He took a breath, closing his eyes in mild regret. He almost thought he’d gotten away with it, too. But Major Hooker was waiting, and so Kaden turned and marched back to his commanding officer, trying to keep a straight face under the man’s judging gaze._

_“Creative use of resources today, Kaden,” he began. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen someone freeze a water stream to make a path before.”_

_Kaden had. Ratchet had given him the idea by doing so to create a grind rail while escaping some kind of citadel-sized space beast. He didn’t say that, however, just kept eyes forward and mouth shut._

_“You know… ingenuity is a useful trait in the Avoidables. One we don’t train, because you either got it or you don’t. Never really picked you for it, though. Someone giving you ideas?” Hooker prompted. “That Azimuth politico?”_

_He just barely restrained his bark of laughter into a smirk. Alister was even less creative than he was. “No sir. Not Alister, sir.”_

_Hooker considered him for a moment, then shifted his weight back on his hips. “Between this and how you handled yourself with that break-in last month, you’d want to be careful, Kaden. Keep this up, and you’ll get promoted into a full-time protection gig.”_

_He blinked, forcing himself to stay otherwise still. Protection details were the_ dream _. You dedicated your life to keeping a single piece of technology secret and safe. There was no higher honour in the Avoidables. “I… wasn’t aware there were any available, sir.”_

_“Not right now,” he agreed, but the tone was clear. The Supreme Court were always watching. “Go get cleaned up. You’re a disgrace.”_

_“Yes, sir,” he said, and hurried off toward the locker rooms, forcing down his grin._

 

* * *

 

Drunken laughter almost startled Kaden out of his dream before he could realise that’s where he was, and he jerked around, completely displaced.

For the first time ever, he really recognised the place he found himself in. It was a Fongoid bar he and the other Avoidables liked to visit sometimes, to get themselves away from all the technology they were responsible for. It even took him a couple of looks before he realised the bartender wasn’t the same – but he’d be damned if it wasn’t a relative to old Gingle.

His boy wasn’t in Kaden’s preferred booth though – he was sitting at a dark table in the back with Clank, while Talwyn was at the bar ordering. Kaden wandered over to take an empty seat at the table behind Ratchet’s back, exchanging polite nods with the little robot.

“—just wonder what it was they did to mess up so bad that they’d renounce all technology,” Ratchet was saying quietly.

“The fongoids do seem to trade in extremes,” Clank pointed out. “Perhaps they thought this was the only way to avoid temptation.”

“I guess that would be why the zoni don’t mind hanging around still,” he agreed vaguely, and Kaden did a double-take.

As an Avoidable, he had to be at least relatively well-versed in zoni technology, which also meant he needed to understand what was known of their history. But for all his research into the zoni, he’d never heard of any connection with the fongoids.

“I am not convinced they have the capability of understanding the consequences of their presence here,” Clank said bluntly, making Kaden stare even more. It almost sounded like he’d—“Most zoni are simply a part of the hive.”

“Yeah, but if your dad or grandfather or whatever told them not to…”

Kaden gaped. Ratchet lived a strange life by any means, but he and Clank were speaking as if they’d not only met zoni before, but enough to know what they were like, what their hierarchal structure was, what they actually _were_.

But the conversation didn’t pick back up as Talwyn stepped up to the table and triumphantly planted a beer in front of Ratchet. “Congratulations!”

Both he and Clank stared at the bottle, then up at her. “What?”

“It’s a rite of passage,” she said, swinging into the seat opposite him. “The first drink you have as a legal adult should be cheap beer, skolled in one go.”

“A legal adult?” Clank repeated curiously, as Kaden shot a quick glance at Ratchet. If he actually was twenty-five, he was still short for his age, but there wouldn’t be too many indicators until his ears started growing.

“Now that Ratchet’s twenty-five, or… thereabouts,” she added in response to Ratchet’s wry glance, “the Polaris Guard considers him an adult lombax. And Dad’s research says that means he’s all ready to get his first omniwrench and go off-world on his own!”

“I’ll get right on that,” Ratchet deadpanned, while Clank tilted his head.

“I do not understand. Ratchet has –”

The girl cut him off with a fond smile and a raised hand. “Let it go, Clank. Now, drink up, Ratchet! I brought you here to get drunk and take advantage of your finally legal tail, so let’s go!”

“Wow,” Ratchet said, even as he lifted the beer. “Way to sound creepy, Tal.”

“Hey, I’ve been _feeling_ like a creep. You could have told me you were  a _baby_ ,” she said, and grinned when he glared at her over the bottle.

“No one knew?” Kaden asked, and Clank turned a little toward him. He leaned over the chair. “You’re telling me that no one even knew he was a child? That they let him fight wars without even checking his _age_?”

“While it does not surprise me no one recognised him as young in Solana, I find it difficult to believe that his youth was not a known issue here in Polaris. It was not that long ago that the lombaxes were quite a large presence here,” Clank agreed, but Talwyn shrugged like she was talking to him.

“I once asked my dad how he could devote an entire career to figuring out the lombaxes. It’s not like the zoni, where no one’s seen them for centuries,” she said. “Apparently they were just that secretive. Some holdover from the Great War, or something. Never told anyone anything. Never let outsiders into their citadels, except the trading posts… Tachyon was the one exception. He was some kind of social experiment, apparently.”

Ratchet slamming the now-empty bottle on  the table startled Kaden out of the conversation and dream, and he stared at the ceiling, struck dumb by everything he’d heard.

 

* * *

 

While it certainly wasn’t the strangest thing he’d seen in these dreams, Kaden found it remarkably difficult to adjust to being in space without an oxygen mask. Even worse was finding himself in incredibly dangerous locations that most sane people wouldn’t bother visiting. As he became aware he was on one of the minor magma moons in the inner system, he grimaced and shifted back against the closed cockpit of Ratchet’s ship. For some reason it felt safer like that.

The boy himself was just visible on the curve of the horizon, running with a strange round gun that was easily the same size as him. While it wasn’t obvious why he was using it, the gun’s purpose was quickly revealed to be a strange kind of portable water hose, as Ratchet stopped every few cubits to soak something ahead of him.

And then he abruptly put it away to snatch out his omniwrench instead, and slid into the smooth glide of a hoverbooter. Kaden couldn’t see what he was chasing, but he apparently caught it fairly quickly, holding it triumphantly overhead before stuffing it in a container by his side.

He walked much more sedately for a few steps, and then was abruptly launched into the air. Kaden flinched, jerking upright, but Ratchet had apparently been expecting it, because he only pinwheeled his arms a few times before preparing himself to land, less than a cubit from the ship.

What he apparently wasn’t expecting was a group of small but bulbous-headed creatures to burst out from the container on his back and launch themselves at the ship. Kaden yanked his limbs in close to himself, but the little creatures didn’t go anywhere near him, simply doing a few whirlwind-fast circuits around the ship before zooming back into their container.

After a few beats, Ratchet slowly relaxed out of the shocked freeze he’d stiffened into, and tapped something on his hip. As Kaden watched, the armour he was wearing flickered down into the base form of a hard-light suit, and the ship’s cockpit cracked open. He jumped up, did an impressive double-flip, and landed perfectly in the pilot’s seat.

Kaden scrambled down to sit in the other chair before the cockpit closed again, which was the only reason he heard Ratchet muttering as he removed his oxygen mask. “It’s every three. Every three zoni, I get a new upgrade. Why are they doing it? It makes no sense.”

“Zoni! Wheeee!” the voices came from the container, and both Ratchet and Kaden stared back at it for a few seconds before Ratchet slowly turned back to the front.

“Just take it. Don’t ask questions you don’t need answered,” he told himself, and started pre-flight checks.

Kaden smirked, because that was the kind of advice a lombax never, ever took.

 

* * *

 

Once again, Kaden blinked as he recognised the cliff he was standing on. The Criton Valley stretched out below, its beautiful purple foliage gently waving in the breeze. He turned to find Ratchet tinkering with what seemed like some kind of vending machine, apparently for the  fongoid sitting a cubit away, watching with the wary suspicion they had for all technology. Clank was standing by Ratchet’s toolbox, staring into the distance and occasionally tapping his hands together in thought.

“You know,” the fongoid said suddenly, “it’s okay if you can’t fix it.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Ratchet replied. “It’s just a few shredded wires.”

“But if you don’t have the parts –”

“Gwynan, buddy, calm down,” he said, glancing up with a grin. “It’ll be like another half-hour. Then, if Clank’s finished on the diagnostic, we’ll be all done and you won’t have to worry about it again.”

The fongoid slumped over, obviously disappointed, and Ratchet shook his head. “Why do you guys even have GrummelNet vendors? Or those teleporters? You hate technology.”

“I don’t know,” it said wearily. “The elders say we were—snerk—told to take them on if—snarf—they were ever offered to us.”

Ratchet’s eyes flickered to Clank before coming back to the fongoid. “Told, huh? You know who by? Or why?”

“I don’t know who said we had to, but as for why—snerk—I think it’s because of the foretold heroes. So that makes me—snick—think it must’ve been the zoni.”

Kaden jerked a little, then moved around to crouch between the two of them. This was the third dream in a week to have mentioned the zoni, and the whole situation considered, he was willing to take this as a hint.

But Ratchet just considered that response quietly for a few moments, and went back to his work as he asked, “The zoni told you to give up technology too, right?”

“I don’t think so. I think we decided that on our own,” the fongoid said. “We made the mistake, whatever it—snuff—was, and so we decided to pay for it. And it doesn’t make sense; if the zoni made us—snick—give up technology, then why would they make sure—snarf—we had stuff for the foretold heroes? Wouldn’t they just provide it thems—snarf—selves?”

 “That’s a good point,” he said. He narrowed his eyes, obviously thinking about something, but Kaden considered the fongoid instead.

It was a relatively well-known fact that the fongoids had done _something_.  There were historical records of the fongoids being technological gods, and an almost omniscient race, before they abruptly stopped and reverted to almost stone-age living. They still used enough technology to mine oil and raritanium, but nowhere near the level they once had. But they’d never explained why.

Which would make sense, if the zoni were involved.

But why, then, would they talk to Ratchet about it? He turned, tilting his head at his boy, then glanced at Clank instead.

‘Is this a zoni thing?’ Ratchet had asked him once. And another time, more recently, he had said ‘But if your dad or grandfather or whatever had told them…’

Was the little robot connected to the zoni somehow? Is that how he could see him across the time streams?

What connection would the zoni have to a robot backpack that seemed to have no function beyond helping a lombax child battle armies?

“What do you think it was?” Ratchet asked, jerking him out of his thoughts. Despite the question, Ratchet still appeared solely focussed on his work, and his expression was curiously blank. Only his ears, curving downward and sweeping back toward his skull, hinted at some dark thought. “What do you think they did that was so bad it caused… everything that happened?”

“Who knows?” the fongoid didn’t look all that concerned by either the question or Ratchet’s odd expression. “Whatever it was, it’ll probably get fixed by the foretold heroes, right? Maybe we’ll—snerk—find out when they appear.”

Ratchet looked up at that, but aside from his ears quivering, it was impossible to guess at his thoughts. He just blinked a few times, then went back to work without a word.

Kaden watched him for a minute, then went back to Clank. He faded out of the dream still wondering.

 

* * *

 

_Alister watched him pace with amused patience, which was aggravating in its own way. Kaden was getting very sick of feeling like people were humouring him when he talked about the dreams and what they meant for reality._

_“It was a zoni artefact that started this whole thing. If I can just figure out why they would show me these dreams…” he muttered. “If I can just figure out their connection with him, I…”_

_“What makes you think they have any connection with this kid?” asked Alister. “Or that they meant for you to see any of it at all? One of the weird things just zapped you, didn’t it? Coincidence.”_

_“No. No, it’s too consistent. The dreams are always about Ratchet.”_

_“Who you don’t even know for sure exists,” he argued. “Doctor Albedo liked my theory about him being your inner child, right?”_

_He scowled. “A projection my subconscious provided to give me an anchor,” he corrected. “And I don’t buy it. I’ve seen him age. I’m not that creative.”_

_Alister shrugged, smiling since he apparently couldn’t argue that. So he went back to one of his other points. “The zoni are practically a myth. Aside from the artefacts your guys find sometimes, practically no one has heard from them since before the Great War!”_

_“And there has to be a reason for that,” he insisted. “Some – some event forced them from interacting further. I’m betting it has something to do with the fongoids.”_

_“The fongoids? Those anti-technology freaks?” he asked. “That seems a jump.”_

_“They were one of the most advanced and mysterious races in the known universe until suddenly, they gave it all up, for no apparent reason,” he said. “Just like the zoni disappeared for no reason. I would bet my wrench that they’re connected.”_

_“And I’d bet mine that you’re wasting your energy.” Alister sighed and sat back in his chair, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. “Even if they are connected, how do they relate to your dreams? I thought Doctor Albedo and that Avogadro guy were focussing on figuring out some new and terrifying lombax secret.”_

_He shook his head. Ever since Joen had dismissed Ratchet as something his subconscious had cooked up, he hadn’t exactly been hanging out for her every theory. And Toen wasn’t much better, going through every last one of their catalogued lombax inventions in search of something that could end the galaxy. Neither of them were going to help him find Ratchet, let alone find some way to save him._

_The zoni were masters of time travel. Clank had some connection to the zoni. They would help Kaden find him._

_He just had to figure out what had happened to them first._

 

* * *

 

“No problem. Thanks for sorting things out with the museum,” Ratchet was saying as Kaden became aware of the dream around him. He blinked himself more alert, slowly realising he was in the space station Ratchet seemed to spend time with Talwyn in, the markazian herself sitting on a couch beside Clank, while an exhausted-looking Ratchet spoke to a communication projection.

“Yes, well, you were technically under duress. And gave it back. And are a tri-galactic hero.”

Ratchet huffed out something that could have been a laugh in another life, then started reaching for the control panel. “You have the signal of my ship if you need anything else.”

“We do. For the record, you’re still suspended without pay pending a formal investigation. I’m sure you’re really torn up about it.”

“Absolutely heartbroken,” Ratchet agreed, and the projected markazian winked at him before shutting off. Ratchet turned back to Clank and Talwyn, who smirked.

“I give them a week before you’re given a full pardon with backpay.”

“Whatever,” he said, wandering over to sink down on Clank’s other side. He dropped his head against the back of the couch and stared at the ceiling. “How long do you think it will take before the space between dimensions heals?”

“Millennia,” Clank said, pointedly ignoring Kaden’s blank stare. “The walls between space and time are not meant to be trifled with. And I do not know of any caretakers for space.”

“I can’t decide,” Ratchet said quietly, “whether it would’ve been better for her to know about the Dimensionator earlier or not. I mean… obviously it would’ve been bad no matter when it happened, but at least if she’d had it from the start, then she wouldn’t have destroyed all those people’s homes. Hurt the sector so badly. All those things.”

Talwyn shifted, pulling her legs up onto the couch and resting her cheek on her hand. “She might never have been arrested in the first place. Cronk and Zephyr…”

“It is not wise to linger on what could have been,” Clank said firmly. “Ratchet, you know that better than anyone.”

“Yeah, I do, I just…” He hesitated, then slung his arm over the back of the couch, so he could just reach Talwyn’s elbow. His fingers grazed it lightly, even as he continued watching the ceiling. “They never told anyone anything. Maybe it was for good reasons at the time. But whatever those reasons are, I sure don’t see them.”

 “She was one person, Ratchet,” Talwyn murmured. “But if people thought there was a working portal to other dimensions… maybe more people would do stupid stuff.”

He turned his head a little to look at her, then dropped his gaze to Clank. Eventually he turned his head back toward the ceiling. “Maybe I should shut up about the stuff I see then.”

“I do not believe that would be a wise course of action either,” Clank advised. “By telling the universe of the marvels you encounter, you also protect them from others who may stumble across them. Think what could have occurred if anyone else had found Darkwater’s treasure.”

“Captain Slag probably wouldn’t be gracing the galaxy with his beatboxing talent, for one thing.”

There was an odd pause before Talwyn snorted. Another moment, and she lowered her head into her arm in a fit of silent giggles. Ratchet looked at her again, a smile fighting its way onto his lips until he too started snickering. That just set her off even worse, and soon all three of them were laughing at nothing much in particular.

Kaden stared at them all, not getting the joke, or most of the conversation.

 

* * *

 

Ratchet and Talwyn were again sitting in front of a communications console when Kaden next turned away from the stars. Clank was nowhere in sight, but Ratchet looked oddly vulnerable, sitting with his hands pressed together under the table, where the holoprojection couldn’t see.

“Okay, I think that’s all the questions we have for now,” the projected markazian said slowly. It was a different one from before, but still wearing the uniform of the Polaris Defence Force. “Thank you for your honesty, Mr Ratchet. I… admit to being surprised.”

“Why?” he asked dully.

“Well, you have to admit, lombaxes aren’t exactly known for being forthcoming.”

Kaden sneered. As Ratchet had said in his dream only a few nights ago, they kept their secrets for a _reason_. They told the rest of Polaris what they needed to know; just because that wasn’t every scrap of information they had… But Ratchet didn’t defend his species, he just paused for a few moments before saying, “Well, then I’m glad I can buck the trend for you. I’d like to go now.”

“Of course. Thank you for your time, and good luck finding your friend.”

“Thanks,” he said, and Talwyn was the one to switch off the communicator.

She smiled at him encouragingly. “They’re right, you know. Even during that final war, the lombaxes almost never told Allied Polaris anything. If someone had asked me, I would’ve been one hundred percent sure you’d keep everything that happened over the last week to yourself. I thought I’d have to sneak off to tell the Defence Force about it.”

“Yeah, well,” He pushed away from the table, setting his hands on his hips and turning his back to her. “I spent seventeen years of my life being told ‘well, you kind of look like the picture in this info-file, so you’re probably a lombax’. I’m sorry if I don’t match your species profiling.”

Whatever Talwyn had been about to say was lost on her tongue, along with her burgeoning grin, and she looked back down at the table.

Ratchet let out a soft breath, then shook his head and started walking away. “I’ll be in the docking bay.”

Kaden watched him go, startled to realise he suddenly knew why no one had recognised his boy as a child for so long.

Lombax children weren’t allowed out of lombax-only settlements. They didn’t spread information unnecessarily. There was no way the universe could have known.

No wonder Ratchet had never really been a kid.

 

* * *

 

“Oh my god, Ratchet.”

Kaden turned away from the window, only to flinch and almost turn away again before stopping himself. Once again, he’d found himself in a bedroom, though this time Ratchet was mostly dressed and Talwyn at least had a shirt on where she sat in bed. She was holding a recorder in her lap. They both looked a little ragged, explained by the empty bottles lined up by the bed. It had apparently been a fun night for them.

“I recorded a message for my dad last night,” she croaked. “I was absolutely convinced I was going to send it to him.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t exactly clear on how,” Ratchet noted, as he went back to pulling on a work vest. “But it was real sweet of you.”

She peered at him through narrowed eyes. “I don’t remember most of last night, but I can’t imagine anything I did in a bed with you could be called sweet.”

He chuckled but didn’t otherwise respond, zipping up the vest and reaching for his boots. While he pulled them on, Talwyn took a steeling breath before pressing play.

“ _Hi Daddy! I have to tell you something very important. You know – know how you were always looking for a lombax? Well, I found one. All on my own. And I caught him. He got away from me for a while, but I got him back_.”

On the recording, Ratchet could be heard laughing, before some unidentifiable thumping and cloth noises overtook everything for almost a minute, in which Kaden watched Talwyn’s face slowly turn red. Ratchet was grinning, standing near the door with his fists on his hips.

“ _Anyways. Anyways,_ ” Talwyn’s slurred voice returned, sounding triumphant. “ _I wanted you to know that they’re so, so, so much better than you told me. They’re not just like heroes or whatever. Psh. Nope. My lombax… my lombax,_ ” she sounded softer now, more distracted. “ _He’s amazing. The best person I’ve ever known. He’s… selfless and honest and good and… and he likes me, Daddy. I love him… I love you._ ”

The recording went muffled again, then beeped with the end of the message. Talwyn lowered it, still blushing bright red, and didn’t look at Ratchet. Kaden did, however, surprised to see he didn’t seem embarrassed at all. Rather, he waited a moment, then moved over to sit on the bed in front of her. She peeked up from under her brow, and he smiled, before leaning in to press their foreheads together.

“I’ve gotta go organise our apology,” he murmured, without otherwise moving. “Meet you in Luminopolis for lunch?”

“You’re buying,” she replied, and he hummed, before pulling up and away to head out.

Kaden woke up slowly, found himself wrapped up in his girlfriend, and smiled.

 

* * *

 

_His bedroom wall was beginning to look suspiciously like it belonged to a conspiracy theorist, but it wasn’t like Kaden had a better place or way to do this. He taped another scrap of information to the wall and took a step back, as if distance would help him understand it better._

_The fongoids gave up their advanced technology around the same time as temples to the zoni stopped being built. New legends about zoni had stopped appearing._ Something _had happened, causing both races to metaphorically disappear. Ratchet existed in the future, and had dealt with the zoni, so they were still around, just keeping to themselves._

_So it was something about the zoni that was big enough to scare them into hiding._

_The zoni were reputed to be dimensional travellers, but Kaden doubted that was it. The lombax secret had been created after the zoni disappeared – if crossing dimensions was the problem, the zoni would have interfered to have stopped them. But the only other thing the zoni were known for was time travel, and…_

_He slowly lowered his gaze, Ratchet’s determined smile flashing in his mind’s eye._

_Ratchet, who was the last lombax in a future Kaden was able to see into because of an accident with zoni technology._

_That was it._

_That was all of it. The fongoids, Ratchet, Clank, the zoni’s disappearance, all of it… it was about time._

_The big event that had caused them to disappear had to involve time travel._

 

* * *

 

“Oh, good, more banter! I do so enjoy banter – I wish they’d put more of it in. Such an energetic lad, your boy, you’d think he’d talk more. I suppose he conserves his breath for running, but still. The long silences make watching these things quite tiresome sometimes.”

Kaden groaned and lifted a hand to his eyes. For some reason, it felt harder than usual to bring himself fully conscious. He used the other hand to brace against the hard floor below and awkwardly lever himself upright, struggling to open his eyes.

“But I suppose my son is perhaps worse. He doesn’t even breathe, so he could chatter all day long if he so chose. You’d think he would, then. But he has spent most of his life with your boy, so perhaps there’s your explanation. Shame, really.”

Eventually, he managed to blink his eyes open and look up. He was in a huge white room, a large fainting couch behind him and what seemed to be some kind of holo-player hovering in the air above. He stared at it for a few seconds – it showed Ratchet jogging through a swampy marsh, the green hulk and tall robot loping along behind him while Clank watched them both from his back. Kaden squinted, then turned to look at the couch behind him.

There was a creature sitting on it.

It sort of looked like the creatures Ratchet had scooped up in his container on the magma planet, but different somehow. More… intelligent, perhaps. It smiled at him.

“Yes, before you ask, I can see you. Come, come, sit up here! Join me! It can be so much fun, watching our boys save the universe!”

Kaden looked around the room, feeling even more off-balance than usual. This didn’t feel like one of his normal dreams, but he didn’t have another explanation. He slowly got to his feet and moved over. “Are you a… a zoni?”

“I am! I knew you were going to be intelligent,” it said cheerfully. “You may call me Orvus. Well! You may call me anything you like, really, and I daresay I wouldn’t mind it either, as long as it’s not late for dinner! Ah hah! Not that I eat that much, but it’s the principle of the thing. You are called Kaden, yes? Yes! I’m so glad we could get those formalities out of the way!”

He wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to any of that, so he looked back at the holo-player. “You’re watching Ratchet.”

“Well, to be perfectly frank with you, _I_ am watching XJ-0461. But we are allowed to play favourites, you and I – I think it’s only fair!” it said. “What isn’t fair is that we’re doing it before it happens. But sometimes spoilers can be great fun, don’t you think? Learning just enough to know the outcome, but not how it _happens_. It can truly spark the imagination!”

“I don’t understand,” he admitted. “If you’re a zoni, does that mean you know why I’ve been having these dreams?”

“Of course I do! You touched the timecog. It was very foolish of you, of course, but we knew what we were doing in allowing a lombax to find it,” it said with a laugh that sounded very similar to Clank’s evil little giggle. “Ah, you lombaxes never could leave well enough alone. Well, most of you. I have a feeling your boy is going to be very good at it in time. Truly an example for all of you. A little late, but better late than never, as they say!”

“Time… cog?”

“Yes! To give you a glimpse of what you would need to see!” it said. “I suspect it will start to wear off soon, which is why I decided to open this little portal so we could have our little tete-a-tete.”

He shook his head, not following at all, so he grasped the only thing he could. “If you’re watching Ratchet, you must know about him. And you’re a zoni. You can tell me how to find him. Where—when—is he? Who is his family? Am I going to be able to meet him?”

“Answers you will learn in time, I assure you,” it said, then grinned. “But those are spoilers I will keep to myself! Just as you have your own to uncover.”

It wasn’t going to tell him anything. He rocked back on his heels, pressing a hand to his head. “Why… why am I here?”

“Well you may as well have been here as anywhere, yes?” it said. “And I did want to give you the warning that the timecog’s effects will soon start to decay. You’ve built up quite the attachment to your boy—understandably so—and I didn’t want you to develop any _separation anxiety_. It seems to run in your family. Quite problematic. And it wouldn’t do for you to get bogged down in something like that when you’re so close to such a breakthrough.”

“What?”

“Keep going! You’re doing very well! I have every confidence you will succeed in your endeavours. I’ll try to meet you again soon.”

He opened his eyes with a flinch, and his girlfriend raised an eyebrow at him over her magazine.

 

* * *

 

Once again, Kaden woke up in the middle of a place that felt… off-balance. He stared around at a strange blue world, interspersed with white platforms and buildings, and decided that wherever he was, it was somewhere he never wanted to find in reality. It didn’t feel right.

But maybe that was because he could tell this was one of the dreams Orvus had apparently given him, and he couldn’t see—

“ _Ratchet_!”

He jerked around, looking up in time to see Ratchet fall from a platform high above, boneless and limp like Kaden had never seen before. On instinct, he ran to catch him, but it was no use – his hand was the only thing to reach in time, and Ratchet’s shoulder passed right through it before he crashed into the ground.

And didn’t move.

Kaden stared, breath caught in his throat.

Ratchet was… Ratchet…

He fell to his knees, shaking hand reaching out. His boy was wearing the base suit of a hard-light armour set, but it obviously hadn’t been turned on yet. If it had, then the shot might not have… There was a burn. Right over Ratchet’s heart. It had melted the suit’s nylon coating, smoothing the reflectors out into nothingness. An electric laser shot would have done that, and kept going right through.

“This… this isn’t possible,” he whispered. “This can’t be…”

He’d seen Ratchet older than this. He had. When he’d been sick, and that time with the gun, when he’d zapped himself. He’d definitely been older then, and alive, and this…!

But here and now, Ratchet wasn’t breathing. There was the burn, and even as Kaden watched, blood was beginning to pool beneath his head, from the fall. His neck was at an angle that was just _wrong_.

“Ratchet,” he gasped. “I didn’t… this can’t… I didn’t get to…”

There was shouting somewhere up above, and the sound of energy weapons firing, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. He just slumped over his knees, brought his laced fingers up to his forehead, and mourned the child he’d never known.

 

* * *

 

He was back in the strange world, surrounded by blue atmosphere and white buildings. He frowned as he shifted backwards, immediately nervous. It had been over a week since he’d had one of these dreams, and he hated the ones that happened here anyway. Especially since this was where—

Ratchet crossed his line of sight, and Kaden flinched. Not only was his boy alive and well, but he looked older than he’d been in the last dream. His ears were too large for his head, while his limbs were just edging into gangly. His final growth spurt was really kicking off. So he must have survived the fall, somehow.

Kaden hurried after him, trying to find some hint. Cybernetics, or biotechnology, maybe. But there was nothing. He looked the same as ever, walking alongside Talwyn and a few steps behind Clank, who was carrying a bulky sceptre easily twice his own height. None of them seemed aware that the last thing Kaden had seen of them was Ratchet dying.

Talwyn did look nervous though. “And it’s really okay for us to go through? I thought the whole point of this was so people didn’t go messing around with the time stream.”

Kaden did another double-take. Time stream?

“Yeah,” Ratchet agreed slowly. “This isn’t gonna, I don’t know… break everything, is it?”

“Ensuring that does not occur is why I will be staying here,” Clank said. “I will monitor all of the time fluctuations, and advise you when your actions are likely to cause problems.”

Ratchet winced. “That’s not exactly reassuring.”

“It is all I have,” he replied, and then stopped and turned around to look at them directly. “While I thank you both for the offer, I feel obligated to say that neither of you need to do this. It is not your responsibility.”

“Like that’s ever stopped Ratchet,” Talwyn joked, and Ratchet gave her a dirty look before fixing Clank with a more serious one.

“Your friend needs help, and that means you need help. You know I’m always here for whatever you need,” he said, but then pulled back, awkwardly rubbing at his arm. “The only thing I’m worried about is breaking the rules. How am I supposed to fix anything without causing everything to explode?”

_Explode?!_

Kaden hurried over, trying to catch Clank’s eye, but the robot was ignoring him completely, his tone surprisingly gentle as he reassured Ratchet.

“You will not be reversing time. You will be altering events to ensure their stability. Making things more like what they were supposed to be, prior to the original interference,” he explained. “I could do this myself, with the tools here, but…”

“But it’d be easier with the hands-on approach,” Ratchet finished for him. “I get it. We’re taking some of the stress off the quantum mechanics by doing it manually.”

“In layman’s terms, I suppose so,” Clank agreed, and adjusted his grip on the sceptre. “I… thank you. Both of you.”

Talwyn smiled warmly, and Ratchet pulled out his omniwrench, swinging it around his hand once before laying it over his shoulders. “Let’s get this party started, pal. When to first?”

Kaden hauled himself up onto his elbows, blinking dumbly at nothing.

Fixing a broken time stream…

 

* * *

 

_Joen squinted, obviously struggling to follow his argument. “Time travel? You think the zoni taught the fongoids time travel?”_

_“It makes perfect sense,” he said, holding out a hand to stall her objections. “Think about it. For centuries, there are countless stories about the fongoids as amazing beings that seemed to know everything there was to know. They couldn’t make a mistake. Everything they did seemed perfect and planned out… because it had already been tested in a timeline that never ended up being, because they saw the outcome and adjusted their decisions to get the best future for themselves. It was the same with technology – they didn’t have to invent anything of their own, they just went far enough forward in time to take what would be useful and bring it back! That was how they could be so advanced without any technological or engineering skill. It was all time travel!”_

_“Alright,” she said slowly. “Putting aside the issue of paradoxes and all the complications associated with time travel theory… let’s say your theory holds water. Why aren’t they still doing it?”_

_“Because of those paradoxes you just put aside,” he said. “The time stream is malleable to an extent. It can handle small changes. If I had never touched that timecog, I would never have seen the dreams I have. I would have never learned about Ratchet, or the future. I would have gotten a lot better sleep, over the last three months. But so what? But just imagine if Salem Gyrosc hadn’t gotten hit over the head with Farrell Clawhaus’s wrench. Such a small event, but with five hundred years of culture to develop and change…”_

_“If Gyrosc hadn’t been assaulted, he might never have gotten the idea for the omniwrench,” Joen said thoughtfully. “As our military skill expanded, we may have abandoned our engineering. We may have become warriors. Our influence would have never spread across the galaxy. The Great War may have never gotten off the ground, the cragmites may have stood unopposed. That could have ramifications across the entire universe.”_

_“And the time stream wouldn’t be able to take it,” he said. “I think the fongoids did something like that. They took the wrench from Clawhaus, and the time stream came close to shattering.”_

_She nodded slowly, obviously accepting it as a hypothesis. “It’s the natural outcome of giving that kind of power to someone who didn’t understand it. And it would certainly be reason enough to give up the technology. But if the time stream broke, then how are we all still here? The universe should have collapsed in on itself.”_

_“The zoni did something to stop it,” he said simply. “They have technology that bends physics; we find it all the time. They built something to stabilise the cracks in time. Not enough to fix it – it couldn’t be fixed. But enough to keep things going. There’s some kind of… some kind of machine out there. A machine to keep time going. That’s what happened to the zoni. That’s where they are – maintaining the machine and keeping time stable.”_

_“Alright,” she said. “An interesting theory, certainly, but as you say, so what? Do you think these dreams are connected to them?”_

_“Absolutely. I just don’t know how,” he said._

_“Well… say you’re right, and the zoni are protecting time,” she said. “They showed you these dreams to cause the same kind of outcome as Clawhaus’s hammer – inspire you to theorise, perhaps. So that… you could create a similar device?” She winced. “You, Kaden? No offence, but… you’re not the most… advanced engineer I’ve ever met.”_

_“Thanks for trying to soften that blow,” he deadpanned, and then looked away. “But you’re right. I’m not an inventor. I’m a Guard. Maybe it was so I could understand the principle. So I could help guard against something like that happening again?”_

_“Maybe,” she said. “You said the dreams are coming less often now, right? Let’s see if they start to dry up completely, now that you’re ‘aware of their purpose’.”_

_He blinked, then nodded, brow furrowing as he remembered what Orvus had told him. The dreams were already starting to go away. Eventually, they would leave him completely._

_One of these nights… could be his last dream of Ratchet._

_It was a lot more upsetting than his theory had ever been._

 

* * *

 

He was running, that was the first thing he realised. He’d never started out moving in one of these dreams before.

“Could use a little help here, Clank!”

He whipped his head around. Ratchet was right beside him, easily keeping pace with Kaden’s longer legs despite carrying one of his ridiculous guns. They were sprinting toward a cliff, but when Kaden chanced a look backward, he knew it was the better option. They were being chased by tanks. A dozen very large and heavily armoured tanks.

He faced forward and kept sprinting.

“Hey,” Ratchet said lightly, like he was responding to a joke, “take your time! I’m not going anywhere. I’m getting there very quickly, but I’m definitely not going _anywhere_.”

Kaden dared spare a glance at his boy. Clank wasn’t on his back, so Ratchet had to be talking to him through some kind of communication device. That was even less reassuring than the casual banter had been.

“Jump? Without knowing where?” Ratchet cried. “This is a very wide cliff I’m running toward! Your aim better be phenomenal!”

But he wasn’t given any more time to argue, and Kaden couldn’t have even if he’d wanted to. They reached the edge, and leapt.

There was a shining blue rip in the air below them, swirling with light and power in equal measures. They fell with matching shouts, and then there was a strange feeling of… almost déjà vu, before ground hit their feet and they both tucked and rolled on instinct.

It was training that made him look up before he’d even finished recovering, but he immediately wished he hadn’t.

There was something very disorienting about going from running for your life to finding yourself in the middle of someone’s living room in the space of a few breaths. Even worse to find yourself in your _girlfriend’s_ living room. She was sitting on the couch with her mother, both of them gaping.

Ratchet had come up with gun cocked and ready, but he froze at the pair in front of him. For a moment, no one moved.

“C- C- C- Clank,” Ratchet managed finally. “This is worse. This is very much worse. Take me back to the tanks, now!”

Another rip appeared below his feet, and Ratchet dropped out of existence.

Kaden spasmed awake, and the girl beside him grumbled and rolled over in her sleep.

Now he was thinking about it… she and Ratchet had weirdly similar features. The soft forward muzzle and slightly rounded ears. He shook his head, trying to get the mental image out of his head, and fell back against the pillows. That had been a strange dream, even for him.

 

* * *

 

It was almost two weeks later before he found himself in one again.

It was… it was the strange room where he’d met Orvus, but the zoni was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Ratchet was lying on the fainting couch, staring up at the ceiling, while Talwyn leaned over the back of it to watch him.

When Ratchet finally spoke, his voice was thick, like he was trying for nonchalance while fighting a cold. “Why is this hard? I never knew him.”

“I don’t think that matters,” Talwyn said quietly. “I never knew my mother, but sometimes, it’s like I have this idea in my head. I guess it’s what I want my mother to have been like. I know the fantasy. I think I’d miss it if I lost it, somehow.”

He visibly swallowed. “Yeah, I guess.”

Kaden moved a little closer, wondering what they were talking about. For all that he saw the darker sides of Ratchet’s life, it never got easier on those rare occasions Kaden actually saw him hurting. He always wanted to comfort, and hated that he couldn’t.

“It was weird… I kind of wasn’t that surprised that he knew our names,” Talwyn said softly. “I mean, all those times we ran past him, we’ve probably been yelling at each other once or twice, but… it almost felt like he really knew you.”

“Yeah, it did,” Ratchet said, brow furrowing. “But… not who I was. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, like I said: weird,” she murmured, and then shifted further down, so she could lay her chin on her hands. “It seemed like he really cared about you, though.”

Ratchet didn’t seem have anything to say to that, just staring blindly at the ceiling. Talwyn let him absorb whatever he needed to, and then said, “I meant what I said, you know.”

He didn’t immediately react. When he did, it wasn’t with any expression, but he just pushed himself up to sitting, so his head was level with hers. For a minute, he just looked at her, as if judging the words and the meaning behind them against some checklist in his head. But, in the end, he just cupped her face with one hand and pushed their foreheads together, accepting all of it.

“Thanks, Tal. I’m glad you were there.”

She moved her hands to hold him in place, and Kaden turned away with a smile.

He didn’t understand how Ratchet could be attracted to a markazian, but that didn’t really change anything. He was just glad Ratchet had found someone he could feel safe with.

 

* * *

 

“This is the last one, you know. The timecog doesn’t have enough power to keep it going forever. I tried to make it a pleasant one. But then, I suppose I may be a little biased about what makes these interesting. I do so hope you enjoy it, all the same.”

He heard the words, but Kaden didn’t actually remembering listening to them as he became aware of the room around him. He was staring out the window at a deep cherry-red sunset, beautiful over the darkening dunes.

“Veldin,” he murmured, and slowly turned around.

Ratchet was sitting in front of one of two very large and comfortable looking leather recliners, one of which Clank was perched on the edge of. Ratchet had several of his weapons spread out on a sheet in front of him, stripped and cleaned, while Clank seemed glued to the holo-vid they were watching. It was a cheesy spy flick, with none other than Clank himself in the leading role.

“I did not come here to die, Madame Glittergem,” Clank quoted along with the movie, “I came here to dance. Will you join me?”

“I only dance with the best, Secret Agent Clank,” Ratchet replied, his mocking high pitch not matching the film’s robotic seductress at all, especially when he gave up quoting to instead poke fun, “But the script demands I give you an opening to steal my keys!”

“Be quiet, Ratchet, you will ruin the tension!” Clank insisted, and Ratchet snickered.

“Clank, _pal_ , we rehearsed this scene eight times, and you shot it three. We’ve watched it a million times. There is no tension to ruin,” he said. “And Glittergem was a bitch. She deserves to be made fun of.”

“Then you should make fun of her, and not the script.”

“At least the script knew when it was being ridiculous,” Ratchet said, but otherwise left it there. He was fitting a grenade launcher back together with lazy, practiced movements. “D’you ever think about getting back into acting?”

“I do not think so. Robots usually only ever take on a single role, and the days of Secret Agent Clank are long gone,” Clank pointed out. “It has been years.”

“It could be a revival movie. Something bigger and flashier than the series used to have,” he suggested. “Put the entire universe at stake, instead of some diamond or damsel.”

“I believe that would cut a little close to home, Ratchet.”

Ratchet glanced at him, then shrugged and smiled, going back to his grenade launcher. He finished putting it together and then flipped it over his wrist, shoving it down into a weapons locker before picking up the parts of a shotgun. Kaden walked around, nodding to acknowledge Clank noticing him as he moved to sit beside Ratchet on the floor. He stared at his boy, trying to memorise the lines of his face and the efficient movements of his hands.

He didn’t want this to be the last time.

The dreams hadn’t always made sense. Most of them had been hard to watch. Heartbreaking, sometimes. He hated that he’d never found out who Ratchet was – where his family came from, or who they’d been. He didn’t even know _when_ this was, or whether it would ever be possible to meet the kid.

It hurt, so much more than it should have, to know he was never going to see him again.

He wanted to see more. He wanted to see the kid finish growing up. Wanted to see him meet more girls, or properly settle down with Talwyn. He wanted to see how Ratchet had learned to drive and fly. See him retire from mercenary work and get something more stable. Make more organic friends. Find out if he could have kids, or adopt them. Eat weird food, visit exotic places, laugh at bad jokes. Grow old. Have a life. Kaden wanted to see it all.

Instead, all he’d gotten was this.

A hard life, a warrior’s life, interspersed with short, sweet moments of stillness. It didn’t seem fair.

And yet Kaden still knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that his boy was a good man.

He smiled, wishing he could reach out and touch. “I’m going to miss you.”

Ratchet didn’t know he was there, or that anything had been said, and so couldn’t respond. But he did finish snapping the rifle together, and as he pushed it down into the locker, he happened to glance in Kaden’s direction.

He could almost imagine they’d met each other’s eyes.

“Goodbye, Ratchet. Good luck.”

**Author's Note:**

> The 48 are a collection of unfinished and/or pointless fics saved to my hard drive, now posted on Ao3 for people's interest or in case they want to adopt them.


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